NEAR Protocol Makes a Breakthrough With Quantum-Safe Mainnet Signing
NEAR Protocol activated quantum-safe signing on its mainnet on July 20, shipping network upgrade 2.13 with support for the NIST-approved FIPS-204 ML-DSA cryptographic scheme.
The upgrade makes NEAR Protocol quantum-safe at the wallet signature layer, protecting user accounts from a class of attacks that quantum computers could execute against the elliptic-curve cryptography most blockchains use today.
Why Elliptic-Curve Cryptography Faces a Quantum Threat
Every blockchain wallet relies on a signature scheme to prove ownership of funds.
Most chains, including Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), use elliptic-curve digital signatures. The security of those signatures rests on a math problem — the discrete logarithm problem on an elliptic curve — that classical computers cannot solve in any practical timeframe.
A sufficiently powerful quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm could crack that problem in hours, exposing every wallet whose public key has appeared on-chain.
The upgrade positions NEAR Protocol as a first mover among major layer-1 networks, shipping a NIST-ratified post-quantum scheme before most competing chains have moved beyond internal research. ML-DSA, formalized as FIPS-204 by the U.S.
National Institute of Standards and Technology, uses lattice-based mathematics instead of elliptic curves. Lattice problems are believed to resist both classical and quantum attacks because no efficient quantum algorithm for solving them is currently known.
In practical terms, a lattice-based signature scheme derives its security from the difficulty of finding short vectors in high-dimensional geometric structures — a problem that does not yield to the same Shor’s algorithm shortcut that threatens elliptic-curve systems.
NEAR Protocol Quantum-Safe Signing and the NIST Stamp of Approval
The NIST approval is the key detail here. NIST ran a multi-year competition to identify post-quantum cryptographic standards, finalizing ML-DSA in 2024.
Federal agencies in the United States are required to migrate to NIST-approved post-quantum schemes on defined timelines, giving ML-DSA a level of institutional credibility that proprietary or experimental schemes lack. For NEAR Protocol, anchoring its implementation to FIPS-204 rather than an in-house design means the cryptographic assumptions it relies on have been stress-tested by the global research community, not just internal engineers.
NEAR (NEAR) is a layer-1 blockchain with a sharded architecture designed for high throughput and developer accessibility.
Sharding splits the network into parallel processing lanes called shards, allowing transaction volume to scale horizontally without every validator processing every transaction. It has positioned itself as an AI-friendly chain, courting AI agent deployments and on-chain data applications.
Adding quantum-safe signing now places NEAR Protocol ahead of most major layer-1 networks on post-quantum readiness — a meaningful differentiator as institutional interest in long-lived on-chain infrastructure grows.
Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) have not yet activated post-quantum signature schemes on their mainnets. Both communities are actively researching migration paths, but governance complexity and backward compatibility concerns have slowed progress considerably.
Ethereum’s account model and Bitcoin’s UTXO structure each present distinct technical hurdles when retrofitting a new signature algorithm without breaking existing wallets or requiring a hard fork. NEAR Protocol’s faster upgrade cadence, enabled by its on-chain governance structure, allowed it to move from research to mainnet deployment faster than either of those larger networks.
A Race Against a Threat That Is Not Yet Immediate
Quantum computers capable of breaking elliptic-curve signatures at scale do not exist today.
IBM’s current flagship quantum processor operates in the hundreds of physical qubits; breaking a 256-bit elliptic curve key would require millions of error-corrected logical qubits. Most estimates place that capability a decade or more away.
The case for acting now rests on harvest-now, decrypt-later risk.
Adversaries can record signed blockchain transactions today and retroactively break the signatures once quantum hardware matures. Wallets that reuse addresses are most exposed because their public keys are permanently visible on-chain.
By integrating ML-DSA at the signature layer today, NEAR Protocol ensures that accounts created or updated after the upgrade inherit cryptographic protection that remains valid regardless of how quickly quantum hardware advances. That forward compatibility is the core value of the move — not defending against a present threat, but closing a window before it opens.
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