In Brief:
- On July 20, NEAR Protocol turned on quantum-safe signing across mainnet through its 2.13 upgrade, relying on the NIST-approved FIPS-204 (ML-DSA) standard.
- That same release introduces dynamic resharding, letting shards divide on their own without requiring a validator vote or a protocol upgrade.
- Users are able to switch to post-quantum keys through one on-chain transaction, with no need to move assets or swap addresses.
NEAR Protocol brought quantum-safe signing online on mainnet on July 20, placing it among the earliest blockchains to operate a NIST-approved post-quantum signature scheme in a live environment.
Network upgrade 2.13 delivered the change. NEAR opted for the ML-DSA-65 parameter set defined in FIPS-204, a lattice-based algorithm once known as CRYSTALS-Dilithium that NIST finalized as a standard in August 2024.
NEAR Brings Quantum Security To Mainnet
NEAR Protocol (@NEARProtocol) has activated quantum safe signing on mainnet, becoming one of the first blockchains to deploy a NIST approved post quantum signature scheme in production.
The upgrade introduces dynamic resharding, allowing@BSCNView on X ↗
The move is voluntary. Both Ed25519 and secp256k1 signing remain in place, and users can rotate their keys over to ML-DSA today through the NEAR CLI. Doing so requires just one on-chain transaction and leaves both assets and the account address untouched.
ML-DSA does come with a tradeoff. Because its public keys and signatures dwarf those of elliptic-curve schemes, storage and processing demands go up, which is why NEAR kept the migration opt-in instead of mandatory.
Scaling without a vote
Mainnet also gains dynamic resharding with the 2.13 release. NEAR’s sharded architecture grows by adding shards, yet in the past every new shard called for a complete protocol upgrade, a validator vote and a phased rollout.
Under the new model, a shard that reaches a set state-size threshold divides automatically, verified by state witnesses and requiring no manual intervention. The release also introduces a gas sponsorship feature, enabling applications to pay users’ transaction fees on their behalf.
“The agent economy needs infrastructure that can scale to support billions of agents and hold up against post-quantum threats we know are coming,” said Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol. “With the 2.13 upgrade, NEAR now scales automatically as demand grows, and we’re laying the cryptographic foundation to secure agents transacting onchain in the quantum era. We designed NEAR’s account model years ago with exactly this moment in mind.”
Why the account model matters
Ever since mainnet went live in 2020, NEAR accounts have relied on human-readable IDs and rotatable access keys, and they’re never tied to a single keypair. That design is precisely what allows users to switch signing methods while holding onto the same address.
Bitcoin (official site) and Ethereum addresses operate in reverse. Since they’re generated from keypairs, a quantum computer capable of cracking the underlying math would lay bare every address, and the remedy would demand a hard fork or a wholesale migration.
That danger has grown nearer than before. Google’s Quantum AI team has published research addressing the risk to cryptocurrency head-on, pegging roughly $470 billion of Bitcoin as vulnerable.
“Progress has recently accelerated and things that seemed years away have been achieved in months,” said Anton Astafiev, CTO at Near One. “As an industry, we can no longer assume we have time to figure things out or that a working quantum computer is decades away.”
The wallet problem
Embedding the scheme into the protocol turned out to be the simpler task. Wallets, APIs, hardware devices and user workflows must all accommodate the bigger keys and signatures, and today’s hardware wallets have no support for quantum-safe signing.
Near One is collaborating with builders of both software and hardware wallets on the transition. Ledger has already folded a quantum-safe signing option into its SDK.
The effort extends beyond NEAR alone. The Defuse team responsible for NEAR Intents, the cross-chain swap system, is developing quantum-safe Chain Signatures spanning the more than 35 chains NEAR is already linked to.
Markets reacted to the roadmap ahead of its launch. NEAR jumped 28% to $2.24 following the protocol’s earlier announcement of dynamic resharding and post-quantum signing, and the Bitwise Near Staking ETP has attracted $7 million in inflows, according to Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley.