# Q1 Protocol Roadmap Update There was a lot of excitement from the Near community after [the protocol roadmap](https://www.pagoda.co/blog/protocol-roadmap-2023-4-the-next-2-years-of-near) was published at the end of last year. The Pagoda team will respond to this enthusiasm by publishing updates to the roadmap at the end of each quarter to keep the community informed. In this post, we will take a look at the progress made in Q1 as well as changes to the future roadmap. ## What we accomplished in Q1 We made very good progress on the protocol roadmap in Q1. For the experience section, meta transactions and zero balance accounts are fully implemented and included in the latest Nearcore release. Both of these features greatly enhance BOS usability for users from other blockchain networks, particularly Ethereum, and lower the barrier to entry for all new users and developers. We found a better way to do Fast Auth that does not require any protocol change and can be applied more ubiquitously than secp256r1 keys, which are limited to iPhones, so we ended up not implementing this planned feature. In addition, initial work on designing account extensions (allowing an account to deploy multiple different contracts) has already begun. Overall, we are ahead of schedule for the experience section of the protocol roadmap. For the core section of the roadmap, most of the implementation work on cold storage, which reduces the cost of running an archival node, and flat storage, which improves storage read performance, is already done and these features are in the process of being stabilized. Tier 1 network is also in the process of rolling out to mainnet and the data we gathered on testnet already showed a 3x reduction in latency of messages between validators. ## Updates to the roadmap For the experience section, the main update from Q1 is that we are going to prioritize certain features that we used to consider lower priority. For example, account extension is going to be on the roadmap for Q2 of this year rather than Q1 next year. These shifts in priorities were made in order to support the BOS product roadmap, but we are also confident that they are useful updates to enhance the protocol overall.  For the core section, because of the change in timelines on the experience side, there will be delays to some features. Most notably, phase 2 of sharding will be pushed out to next year, as opposed to Q4 of this year as originally planned. The delay is not expected to cause any capacity problems on mainnet in the foreseeable future, as usage is still comfortably supported by the four shards we have today.  To stay up to date with protocol changes as they happen, or to participate in protocol governance, please join [the protocol community group](https://t.me/NEAR_Protocol_Community_Group) and follow [the NEAR Enhancement Proposal (NEP) process](https://github.com/orgs/near/projects/51/views/3).