Shards and Layer-2s: Unpacking NEAR and Ethereum’s contrasting approaches to blockchain scalability

The landscape of blockchain scalability has evolved significantly in recent years, with Layer-2s (L2s) and sharding emerging as the two dominant approaches. Ethereum, a key player in the crypto industry, has adopted rollup-centric L2s to scale its network, while NEAR protocol has taken a different path, choosing to scale via sharding.