NEAR ships quantum-safe signing to mainnet in 2.13 upgrade

In Brief:

• NEAR Protocol activated quantum-safe signing on mainnet July 20 in its 2.13 upgrade, using the NIST-approved FIPS-204 (ML-DSA) scheme.
• The same release adds dynamic resharding, which splits shards automatically without a validator vote or a protocol upgrade.
• Account holders can move to post-quantum keys in a single on-chain transaction, without transferring assets or changing addresses.

NEAR Protocol switched on quantum-safe signing on mainnet July 20, making it one of the first blockchains to run a NIST-approved post-quantum signature scheme in production.

The change shipped in network upgrade 2.13. NEAR selected the ML-DSA-65 parameter set from FIPS-204, the lattice-based algorithm formerly called CRYSTALS-Dilithium that NIST standardized in August 2024.

Adoption is optional. Ed25519 and secp256k1 signing stay available, and account holders can rotate their keys to ML-DSA now using the NEAR CLI. The switch takes a single on-chain transaction and doesn’t move assets or change the account address.

ML-DSA carries a cost. Its public keys and signatures are far larger than elliptic-curve equivalents, which raises storage and processing requirements, so NEAR made the migration opt-in rather than forced.

Scaling without a vote

The 2.13 release also brings dynamic resharding to mainnet. NEAR’s sharded design scales by adding shards, but each addition used to require a full protocol upgrade, a validator vote and a staged rollout.

Now a shard that hits a state-size threshold splits on its own, validated by state witnesses with no human step. The release adds a gas sponsorship mechanism too, letting applications cover users’ transaction fees.

“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

NEAR accounts have used human-readable IDs and rotatable access keys since mainnet launched in 2020, and they aren’t bound to a single keypair. That’s what lets users change signing methods without abandoning an address.

Bitcoin (official site) and Ethereum addresses work the other way. They’re derived from keypairs, so a quantum computer that breaks the underlying math exposes every address, and fixing it means a hard fork or a mass migration.

The threat is closer than it was. Google’s Quantum AI team has published on the risk to cryptocurrency directly, putting an estimated $470 billion of Bitcoin at risk.

“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

Getting the scheme into the protocol was the easier part. Wallets, APIs, hardware devices and user workflows all have to handle the larger keys and signatures, and current hardware wallets don’t support quantum-safe signing.

Near One is working with software and hardware wallet builders on the change. Ledger has already added a quantum-safe signing option to its SDK.

The push reaches past NEAR itself. The Defuse team behind NEAR Intents, the cross-chain swap system, is building quantum-safe Chain Signatures across the more than 35 chains NEAR already connects to.

The market moved on the plan before it shipped. NEAR climbed 28% to $2.24 after the protocol announced dynamic resharding and post-quantum signing earlier in the year, and the Bitwise Near Staking ETP has drawn $7 million in inflows, Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley said.