Huge milestone for NEAR!
Global contract code is a game changer — making common contract deployment 100x cheaper is massive. This unlocks real scalability for devs.
And 600ms block time? UX just leveled up.

Nearcore 2.6 has been released to the @NEARProtocol testnet today, and there are two major upgrades that I find very exciting:

- Global contract code. Now you can deploy a contract that is available on all shards by burning tokens. This addresses a major pain point: on NEAR, deploying contracts is expensive, especially if you deploy a common smart contract such as multisig or fungible token. Now, with a global contract, someone can deploy once and make all subsequent deployments a lot cheaper (more than a 100x reduction in cost). It also paves the road for sharded smart contracts that will be implemented later this year, enabling sharded dapps.
- Block time reduction. Block time will be reduced to 600ms as a result of a major optimization in block production. A ~2x reduction in block time will boost the user experience across the entire ecosystem. Everything should now be much faster. We can push the block time down even further but decided to err on the side of caution and proceed with further reduction if we see everything going well.