The first phase of the NEAR shard upgrade is now live on mainnet. In the middle of this month, NEAR announced that it will launch the first phase of Nightshade sharding this month and introduce Chunk-Only Producers. Chunk-Only Producers are only responsible for generating blocks in one shard. Both the second and third phases will be launched in 2023. The second phase will fully fragment the state and processing, and the third phase will realize dynamic fragmentation. The network will be dynamically split into fragments, and then Merge based on resource utilization to further improve network scalability.