On NEAR Protocol, a chunk is the portion of a block produced by a single shard. NEAR uses a sharding design called Nightshade, in which the network is split into several shards that process transactions in parallel, but the chain still produces one block at a time. Each block is made up of one chunk from every shard, holding that shard's transactions and the resulting changes to its part of the network's state. Specialised validators produce chunks for their assigned shards, and later versions of the protocol added stateless validation, in which other validators check chunks without storing the full shard state. If a chunk is missing, the block can still be produced without it. Also see Block Producer.