200 milliseconds block time, parallel consensus and execution, Spice is ambitious in paving the way for Nightshade 3.0. Supporting complex long-cycle transactions genuinely improves intents and payment experiences.

Crypto News, NEAR has announced its next major protocol upgrade plan, spice (separation of consensus and execution). This upgrade will reduce block time from the current 600 milliseconds to 200 milliseconds, delivering about a 3x speed increase, and will allow consensus and transaction execution to run in parallel. NEAR also said that spice will support more complex and long-cycle transactions, improve the experience in intents, payments, and AI agent scenarios, and lay the foundation for nightshade 3.0, cross-shard atomic execution, and higher scalability.