NEAR announced that it will launch the first phase of the Night Shadow Protocol this month and introduce Chunk-Only Producers, who are only responsible for generating blocks in one shard. NEAR plans to bring in 250 to 400 Chunk-Only Producers, a phase expected to launch later this month. 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. Foresight News notes that NEAR will launch a simplified version of the Night Shadow Protocol (Phase 0) in November 2021. At this stage, NEAR shards the state but does not shard the processing, and blocks are still verified by all nodes.