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The principles, application scenarios and external mechanisms of NEAR private sharding are summarized

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The private sharding mechanism is completely transparent to both users and developers, allowing them to interact with each other without the need for public sharding routes

NEAR Private Sharding: Web3 Infrastructure tailored for the Enterprise
Source: NEAR Protocol

Privacy is very important for enterprises, whether it is to transmit confidential information to partners, or to protect customer data, privacy protection is inseparable. While blockchain has its own privacy-protecting properties, efforts to combine enterprise and blockchain have often struggled.

In the past, companies have used blockchain as a pioneering technology in the form of alliance chains, where a company invites partners or other companies within the same ecosystem to develop a chain, but these alliance chains often run into problems as soon as they start operating.

Business concerns tend to focus on control and access. In addition, how to transfer data from a company's TRADITIONAL software-based IT system to the chain and ensure that IT can be understood by another company's proprietary software is a major headache. Even if these issues are resolved, a number of thorny issues arise such as throughput, cost, and the associated costs of writing/storing data to the chain.

We have been thinking deeply about these issues and have found the perfect solution to help enterprises embrace blockchain and the open web. Our solution is private sharding.

Private sharding: Secure and seamless fusion of public and private

Since its inception, NEAR has been designed as a sharded network, a global system of interconnected users, enterprises, and infrastructure providers. The ability to cut shards for different application scenarios is part of NEAR's design.

In the federation model, blockchains are not interoperable

For example, medical data from a hospital, student information from a university, or sensitive production data, all of these data sets have different requirements and requirements. In NEAR's solution, we can create a private shard to meet all of the above requirements, without the need for the company or organization to develop a new chain from scratch.

In the case of alliance chain, an independent system is required for each usage scenario to adapt to different requirements; in NEAR, it is not needed at all.

NEAR blockchain gives companies the ability to build private shards that can still connect to the public chain. Why do companies need this capability? Let's take a look at the above usage scenario.

Suppose a hospital stores its medical records on a private shard of NEAR, but a patient is sick abroad and his doctor needs access to his medical records. Because the doctor's identity is publicly verifiable, he can make requests to private shards to access these files in a simple and secure way.

Suppose, too, that some of a factory's production data needs to be private and some of its other information needs to be public. For example, if a customer wants to know when a product was made and shipped, private shards can seamlessly publish that data to the public side of the chain.

To be widely adopted, blockchains need to be able to seamlessly blend public and private while ensuring security. Private sharding is NEAR's solution to this challenge and is as simple as starting a node in AWS or Ali Cloud, which will be explored further below.

How private sharding works

Private shards run as shards on the NEAR network, which means that public chain contracts can call private shards and vice versa.

The above implementation and handling of cross-shard routing uses the same mechanism, which is completely transparent to users and developers and requires no additional work (public contracts don't even need to know they're interacting with private contracts). Let's take a look at a usage scenario: two private shards want to interact with each other without going through the public shard route. How does this work? The answer is shared identity space.

In private shards, blockchains can share information without compromising security

Each private shard gets its own name, similar to a network domain name. For example, if Berkeley and Tencent were using the system, they would have accounts like "Berkeley.edu" and "tencent.com."

Inside a private shard, some specific application will have a subaccount. For example, if both parties are using apps to track property ownership:

Properties.berkeley.edu/properties.tencent.edu is such accounts. When selling property between two parties, if the information needs to be proven to a public interested party, the system will require a cross-private sharding transaction and then initiate a potential public chain settlement if needed.

Applications used by these enterprises are built in the same way as other NEAR applications: smart contracts are developed in Rust or TypeScript. This allows creators to develop a front end that can interact with these smart contracts, including transactions that occur across private and public shards.

NEAR's mission is to bridge the gap between today's Internet and the blockchain that will drive the future. Private sharding is a core part of that mission, helping us create an ecosystem where businesses, users, and partners can interact with each other. We welcome anyone to join us and work with us to create a more open and inclusive online world.