NEAR▼$2.22 price pumped about 30% after the network detailed Dynamic Resharding, a June upgrade meant to help the blockchain scale automatically with demand.
NEAR, the native token of the Layer-1 blockchain NEAR Protocol, rose 28.9% on the day to around $2.27 after developers explained the next step in the network’s scaling roadmap.
According to a blog post released by the NEAR Protocol developers on May 20, Dynamic Resharding will be implemented as part of the next network upgrade, v2.13, which will likely go live in June.
With Dynamic Resharding, the NEAR Protocol will be able to auto-split its most congested areas in multiple shards, or additional lanes that can handle transactions independently.
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So far, NEAR needed to implement new shards via its upgrade cycle, which took several months for each upgrade. According to the developers, NEAR Protocol grew from one to nine shards in the period since its mainnet launch in 2020.
The June upgrade changes that. Instead of waiting one or two months for each protocol upgrade, NEAR says shards could split automatically when they reach a certain size.
Scaling Push Tied to AI Agents
NEAR says the update will help foster the expansion of NEAR Intents, which is a cross-chain transactions protocol by NEAR, as well as NEAR AI. The project argues that future AI agents could generate large payment and transaction volumes, so the network needs to scale during demand spikes without higher fees or slowdowns.
The project also says earlier scaling work gives the upgrade more room to matter. In 2025, NEAR said it reached 1 million transactions per second in a publicly verifiable benchmark and can now scale to at least 70 shards without losing performance, or about 10 times today’s network capacity.
The June upgrade is also expected to add a post-quantum-safe signing scheme, meaning a new signature design meant to reduce future risk from powerful quantum computers.
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