NEAR mainnet just finished upgrading from 8 to 9 shards today, improving throughput by 12.5%. It was a seamless live upgrade and the network remained stable throughout the upgrade process. The previous upgrade from 6 to 8 shards was the real technical challenge, where we implemented the fundamental change of resharding and made it work with stateless validation. The upgrade was motivated by the state of one shard getting pretty large and potentially requiring chunk producers to have machines with more memory, a problem that many blockchains face. Luckily we can split the state of a shard into two through resharding and elegantly address the state growth problem. We now have a very straightforward pathway for continuing to add more shards and scale the capacity of the @NEARProtocol.