BlockBeats News, June 22, NEAR officially announced the next major protocol upgrade, the SPICE (Separation of Consensus and Execution) proposal, which is a key step towards Nightshade 3.0. After the upgrade is completed, the NEAR block time will be shortened from the current 600 milliseconds to 200 milliseconds, achieving about a 3x speedup, close to the speed limit allowed by physical conditions.

The core of SPICE is to decouple the consensus layer from the execution layer, allowing validators to complete block consensus without waiting for transaction execution, thereby reducing latency and supporting more complex and time-consuming transactions. NEAR stated that this upgrade will be the largest underlying architecture change since Stateless Validation in 2024.

After the upgrade, the transaction experience of NEAR Intents, near.com, and other applications will be further improved. Defuse Labs CEO Alex Shevchenko stated that the final confirmation time on NEAR is expected to be reduced to about 0.4 seconds, faster than Visa's standard of about 3 seconds, achieving a payment experience close to "instantaneous."

NEAR also mentioned that faster block times are crucial for the AI Agent economy, enabling high-speed payments and complex transactions between agents, and allowing longer tasks to be executed across multiple blocks.

Furthermore, SPICE will pave the way for Nightshade 3.0 and lay the foundation for achieving cross-shard atomic execution in the future. The NEAR development team stated that this will help address the development complexity and potential vulnerability issues caused by asynchronous environments, improving network scalability and security.