$NEAR has announced SPICE, its next major protocol update. SPICE, an abbreviation for “Separation of Consensus and Execution,” is seen as a significant step in the network’s Nightshade 3.0 roadmap.
According to $NEAR, the update will reduce block times on the network from the current 600 milliseconds to 200 milliseconds. This represents approximately a threefold increase in speed.
The SPICE update is fundamentally based on separating the consensus layer from the transaction execution layer. This allows validators to reach consensus on blocks without waiting for transaction execution. The goal is to reduce network latency and support more complex, longer-running transactions.
$NEAR stated that this will be the biggest fundamental change to the network architecture since SPICE’s Stateless Validation update, which was implemented in 2024.
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Following the update, the transaction experience is expected to further improve in applications such as $NEAR Intents and nearcom. Defuse Labs CEO Alex Shevchenko stated that the final confirmation time in $NEAR could be reduced to approximately 0.4 seconds. According to Shevchenko, this level represents a faster payment experience than the Visa standard of approximately 3 seconds.
The $NEAR team also argued that shorter block times are critical to the economics of AI agents. They stated that this would enable high-speed payments and more complex transactions between agents, and allow lengthy tasks to be executed over multiple blocks.
The SPICE update is also said to pave the way for Nightshade 3.0, laying the foundation for a future cross-shard atomic execution infrastructure. According to $NEAR developers, this architecture will reduce development challenges and potential security vulnerabilities caused by asynchronous environments, while increasing network scalability and security.
*This is not investment advice.
