The financial situation of the NEAR Foundation remains strong and well-managed, with over $285 million in legal currency, $305 million in NEAR (worth over $900 million), and $70 million in investments and loans. In addition, the NEAR Foundation will reduce about 40% of its team, affecting 35 colleagues, mainly in marketing, business development, and community teams. The NEAR Protocol engineering team at Pagoda will continue to operate as usual.

NEAR Chinese official account announced that the team will launch the second phase of sharding in 2024, introducing stateless validation and extending the original Nightshade design to avoid fraud proof.

NEAR has risen above $3.4 and is currently priced at $3.429, with a 24-hour increase of 20.23%.

On December 16th, NEAR DevHub announced on social media that NEAR Work Group has voted to approve NEP-491 and NEP-508. NEP-491 introduces non-refundable storage space, which aims to allow enterprises to create user accounts with persistent states without worrying about refund abuse. NEP-508 proposes a new sharding method (v2) to expand NEP-40 by addressing sharding overload and optimizing network performance.

According to OKX market data on December 9th, NEAR broke through $2.5 in the short term and is now priced at $2.47, with a 24-hour increase of 10.97%.

According to on-chain data, the total transaction fees for NEAR in the past 24 hours were 35,335 NEAR, a 1300% increase compared to the previous day, and 7.36 times the highest historical value. At the same time, the number of NEAR transactions has recently skyrocketed, with nearly 10 million transactions (9,957,991) on the NEAR chain on November 29, setting a new daily record (previously the highest value was about 3.5 million transactions).

NEAR Foundation announced a partnership with Eigen Labs to achieve faster and cheaper Web3 transactions through EigenLayer for Ethereum rollups. EigenLayer aims to become the world's first "fast finality layer" for Ethereum Layer2, and the team says that transaction times on this network will be shortened to 3-4 seconds, and the cost of transactions conducted on it will be 4,000 times cheaper than current costs.

NEAR and Polygon networks have announced a collaboration to create a zero-knowledge (ZK) prover for Web Assembly (WASM) blockchains. The new prover, called "zkWASM," will enable WASM-based networks to join the Polygon ecosystem for the first time, providing greater security, scalability, developer flexibility, and interoperability in the open web. The zkWASM prover is currently in active development and will be integrated into Polygon's chain development kit (CDK) once completed, allowing developers to create WASM networks and integrate them into the broader Polygon ecosystem. The collaboration will also improve validator efficiency on the NEAR network, resulting in better scalability and increased decentralization.

The NEAR Foundation announced the launch of a new project called "NEAR DA", which aims to provide an alternative venue for Ethereum and its L2 network to handle rapidly growing data volumes. The data publishing cost of NEAR DA may be 8000 times lower than that of Ethereum, providing immediate benefits for Web3 founders exploring modular blockchain development. Early users of NEAR DA include Starknet's Madara, Caldera, and Movement Labs. This news was announced at the annual Nearcon conference on Wednesday.

Wintermute founder and CEO Evgeny Gaevoy has accused NEAR Foundation and Aurora of failing to convert $11 million worth of USN stablecoins. Gaevoy claims that NEAR refused to honor their commitment to facilitate the sale of $11.2 million worth of USN for the FTX estate, despite previously earmarking money for it. Wintermute executed the transaction on the basis that it would be able to redeem USN to USDT on a one-to-one basis, but NEAR allegedly "refused to honor their commitments" and offered a final settlement of 20% of the $11 million. Wintermute plans to pursue legal action against NEAR and Aurora.