NEAR’s Stake Wars III program ends on September 9th, and the program began on July 13th. NEAR said that the test network shardnet built specifically for Stake Wars during the program often has more than 1500 active nodes and 400 validators (blocks + block producers) competing in 11 challenges in the shardnet, while there are still some queued. NEAR stated that the Chunk-Only Producers feature, which was released to the testnet on August 15th, will create more opportunities to earn rewards and further protect the NEAR ecosystem ahead of the planned launch of Phase 1 of sharding next month, The number of validators will also increase from about 100 to about 300.