The developers of the NEAR protocol began deploying phase 2 of the mainnet on a Proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus following an unplanned vote of blockchain validators.

According to the co-founder of the NEAR protocol Ilya Polosukhin, the deployment of phase 2 of the blockchain on PoS has begun six months after the publication of the project roadmap in early May.

“Anyone can now send or receive tokens, create accounts, participate in validation, launch applications, or otherwise use the network,” the development team said. Polosukhin said the project's liquid democracy feature, which allows token holders to delegate control to validator pools, unexpectedly resulted in NEAR Foundation members launching the network earlier than expected. Previously, the network operated on the basis of a proof of authority (PoA) mechanism. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible blockchain is now powered by its own Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus implementation, Threshold.

NEAR Foundation CEO Erik Trautman said it took longer than originally anticipated to test the update as the performance issues of the "edge case" were being addressed.As a reminder, in August, NEAR, in partnership with Ontology, began developing a Decentralized Identifier (DID) solution to improve data privacy and develop decentralized applications (dApps).