While traders were sleeping and Bitcoin was busy flirting with $71k again, the Near crew quietly pushed a button they’d been teasing for months. Boom—59,728 transactions per second lit up the testnet dashboard, and the community chat hasn’t calmed down since.
Here's What Actually Happened
Near’s long-awaited 2.0 upgrade—codename Phoenix—went live at 03:41 UTC on Thursday. The devs swapped in Avalanche-style consensus, bolted on parachains, and sprinkled state compression plus optimistic rollups on top like hot sauce. Independent validators, including the crew over at Staking Facilities, stress-tested the thing and managed to squeeze out an eye-popping 140,162 TPS under lab-perfect conditions. Even the base number—59,728 TPS in real-world mixed traffic—more than doubles Solana’s peak from last winter.
“I kept refreshing the Grafana panel because I thought it was a glitch,”laughs @devchick83 in the official Discord. Same vibe here—I had to triple-check the Prometheus logs before I tweeted the screenshot.
Why Some of Us Are Losing Our Minds Over the TPS Number
Let’s be real: TPS is the crypto version of zero-to-sixty times for sports cars—fun to brag about, rarely the full story. But $0.006 average fees? That’s where my ears perked up. Sub-penny microtransactions are suddenly viable, meaning tip bots, on-chain gaming, even IoT devices spitting data every few seconds become possible without burning a hole in anyone’s wallet.
We’re already seeing interest: 791 dApps have filed migration notices, according to Near Foundation’s public Trello. I caught a Spaces with Paras co-founder @mintyjoe, who said,
“Our NFT floor prices literally can’t go lower, so shrinking gas to fractions of a cent is the only lever left to pull.”
And let’s not skip the builder candy: native Rust smart contracts land with Phoenix. Anyone who’s wrestled with Solidity’s quirks will appreciate pattern-matching without the out-of-gas nightmares.
But Hold On—Is It All Sunshine?
Not everyone is drinking the Kool-Aid. A couple of Eth maxis in my local meetup shrugged, saying, “Sure, but where’s the decentralization?” Fair question. Near’s early stress tests claim 1,595,794 concurrent users with zero degradation, and auditing heavyweights Kudelski + CertiK reported no critical vulns. That calms some nerves, but final verdicts come only after main-net sees real-world spam, MEV shenanigans, and the inevitable NFT mint stampedes. Remember Solana’s Bayesian outage bingo? Yeah, nobody wants a rerun.
I also wonder about validator incentives. Phoenix keeps the minimum staking requirement at 67,000 NEAR (roughly $88k at current prices). That’s accessible compared to running a full Avalanche subnet, yet still lofty for the average degen with a Ledger Nano. Rumor in the validator Telegram is that a micro-stake program could arrive by Q4, but that’s unconfirmed.
What Builders Are Whispering in Telegram
Time-stamped highlights from yesterday’s manic scroll:
- @0xWaffles: “State compression alone cuts our storage bill by 40%—I can actually sleep now.”
- @nate_the_rate: “Optimistic rollups over Near L1 means my game studio can ditch AWS match-making.”
- @defi_granny: “Reminder: Polygon and Optimism just hinted they’re copying this. Good tech travels fast.”
And of course, the money. Near Foundation earmarked $283 million in grants. Applications open Monday; the Google Form is already bookmarking-worthy. One DAO dev joked the real race will be how fast those funds evaporate, not network congestion.
Where This Could Take the Market Next
Price action? NEAR spiked 16% intraday to $7.42, then cooled to $6.88 as Asian traders locked profits. I’m eyeing $8.20 as the next resistance—basically the pre-Luna-meltdown high. If main-net confirms the TPS numbers during the public stress event on June 3rd, I wouldn’t be shocked to see a run toward double digits.
The broader alt market is watching for the “Polygon/Optimism reaction trade.” Whenever one L2 flexes, liquidity seems to boomerang between them like a Twitch streamer switching games. Keep CoinGecko tabs open on MATIC and OP; we might get a sympathy pump.
Macro backdrop helps too—U.S. CPI lands next Wednesday, and if inflation prints under 3.1%, risk-on could roar back. A high-throughput chain with dirt-cheap fees under bullish macro? Chef’s kiss.
So, Should You Ape In or Chill?
I’m not your financial advisor (my cat barely trusts me to pour kibble), but here’s my take:
- Degen angle: Short-term swing into the grant-announcement hype makes sense, just keep stop-losses tight. This market turns faster than a Bored Ape leak.
- Builder angle: Free money plus Rust tooling is hard to ignore. Even if the TPS settles at half, 30k TPS is still nuts for most use-cases.
- Staker angle: Yield remains modest (~9% APY), but if Phoenix adoption drives fees, that could creep upward. And who doesn’t love compounding?
I think the upside outweighs the FUD, but I’m allocating gradual DCA instead of a single YOLO. I learned my lesson with Terra—never marry a chain, date it.
Final Word Before We Log Off
Near just threw down the scalability gauntlet. Whether it’s the “Solana killer” headline Reddit‘s already spamming or merely another step in the great throughput arms race, remains to be seen. Yet one thing feels certain: the days of paying $28 to move $30 are numbered. And honestly, about time.
Catch you in the next block. I’ll be lurking in the Phoenix stress-test channel, popcorn ready.
