Cyber Capital Founder: Endorses NEAR's sharding model, acknowledges drawbacks but sees it as representative of crypto's future
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Cyber Capital Founder: Endorses NEAR's sharding model, acknowledges drawbacks but sees it as representative of crypto's future
Since EGLD and TON have fully implemented sharding, NEAR lags behind some competitors.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Justin Bons, Founder of Cyber Capital
Translation: Felix, PANews
Editor's note: On May 3, Justin Bons, founder of Cyber Capital, posted on X criticizing SUI's token economics as overly centralized—over 8 billion SUI tokens are staked, with more than 84% of the staked supply held by founders, and without any vesting period or legal guarantees. Recently, Justin Bons posted again, offering a "neutral" analysis of the NEAR Protocol, focusing primarily on its sharding model and governance mechanisms. Below is the full text:
NEAR can scale via sharding to meet demand. Currently, there are 6 shards delegated to 467 permissionless validators. NEAR is committed to stateless validation and dynamic load balancing. ETH and SOL should stay alert—otherwise NEAR will take their market share.
Currently, NEAR’s sharding isn’t fully implemented. Although all validators still verify all shards, NEAR’s TPS can exceed 1,000, matching SOL. In a few years, as the roadmap unfolds, NEAR’s TPS could surpass 100,000. This is the power of sharding.
The key here is “parallelization.” SOL achieves this through parallelization (multithreading) within a single machine. Sharding takes it to the next level by distributing the workload across multiple machines, increasing capacity while maintaining decentralization.
This is how the blockchain trilemma is solved—real horizontal scaling that unlocks millions of TPS in the future. The trade-off here isn’t security or decentralization, but speed. Due to cross-shard communication, sharded chains experience a few seconds of latency before finality.
SOL sacrifices capacity for speed. Sharded chains like NEAR, EGLD, and TON sacrifice speed for capacity. This is why the author prefers sharding—unlike “L2 scaling,” this trade-off is at least effective.
The author doesn’t particularly care about L2 data availability. But interestingly, NEAR offers more data availability than Ethereum—and cheaper. One day, chains like NEAR will also be more secure. When that happens, there will be no reason left to use Ethereum.
NEAR also employs a novel sharding model. Block producers don’t create blocks within shards; instead, they add their block/shard into a single block. This helps improve composability while still distributing state workload across multiple shards. It’s a truly unique design.
NEAR’s tokenomics are also excellent. It adopts a model similar to Ethereum, combining fee burning with tail inflation—perhaps the ideal economic design for blockchains, as it combines long-term sustainability with greater scarcity potential.
However, the author strongly disagrees with NEAR’s governance mechanism—and more importantly, with NEAR’s direction. NEAR attempts to weaken the power of large token holders, insisting on concepts like “one person, one vote.”
This completely contradicts stakeholder-aligned governance design, which is what blockchains should prioritize. Blockchains aren’t democratic. NEAR tries to balance its design with democracy, but in reality, this severely weakens NEAR’s governance. Democratic designs require permissioned elements. As long as the “proof of human” problem remains unsolved, true democracy isn’t feasible. We see this in NEAR—joining a “working group” requires filling out a form.
NEAR does have an on-chain treasury. This is an excellent, even possibly critical, mechanism that most blockchains lack. Unfortunately, the treasury is currently controlled by the foundation.
NEAR’s governance is mixed. Let this serve as a reminder: no blockchain meets all of the author’s criteria. Nothing is perfect—and in most blockchains, governance is often the least mature module. Hopefully, NEAR will make progress on stakeholder voting in the future.
Another aspect the author dislikes about NEAR’s design is the “development fees.” A portion of revenue is returned to whoever created that code module. However, this is usually defined outside the contract and fails to meet market expectations, leading to inefficiencies.
In Justin Bons’ view, criticisms of sharding don’t hold up.
Criticism 1. Individual shards are less secure
Shards share the same security guarantees. Aside from DDoS attacks, such threats can be easily mitigated as long as there are enough nodes. Since validators are randomly assigned to shards, attackers cannot choose which shard they end up validating. Therefore, the only way to attack a single shard is to attack the entire L1. Mathematically, the chance of controlling a single shard is negligible.
Criticism 2. Sharding breaks composability
This is also incorrect, because perfect composability is maintained across all shards due to the inherent nature of the design. Since all shards are identical and part of the same consensus mechanism, native interoperability is achievable.
This is exactly what NEAR does with cross-shard transactions. A few seconds of latency does not equate to broken composability. This is also why seamless interoperability between L2s cannot be fully achieved—you’re dealing with different rule sets and power structures.
Since EGLD and TON have fully implemented sharding, NEAR lags behind some competitors. This is because NEAR added certain design requirements along the way—such as stateless verification (which will greatly benefit full sharding in the long run). But that’s competition for you.
Whether the NEAR team continues to focus on L1 scalability through sharding is a multi-billion dollar question. While they are working on other advanced features (e.g., DA and ZK proofs), they remain behind schedule, so concerns are justified.
In summary, NEAR is an outstanding blockchain and sits at the forefront of industry technology. By comparison, Bitcoin and Ethereum are still in the Stone Age.
Ignore NEAR’s flaws—because it clearly represents the future of crypto.
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