This new technical deep dive from the Near One team breaks down SPICE, Separation of Consensus and Execution. SPICE is a significant architectural upgrade for NEAR Protocol that decouples transaction ordering, data availability, and execution. Execution moves off the critical path of block production, so the chain can produce blocks at a high rate while execution and data availability run asynchronously. When SPICE launches, NEAR will have faster blocks, lower latency across near.​com and NEAR Intents, and support for longer-running, more complex transactions. It also lays the groundwork for atomic execution across shards. https://blog.nearone.org/research/2026/09/30/spice-01-intro.html