NEAR Protocol has activated post-quantum transaction signing on mainnet, adding ML-DSA-65 as a native option for accounts and access keys. The upgrade gives users a NIST-standardized quantum-resistant alternative to NEAR’s existing Ed25519 and secp256k1 signatures, allowing account security to begin migrating before sufficiently powerful quantum computers become a practical threat. NEAR mainnet is currently operating on protocol version 86.
The capability shipped through nearcore v2.13.0, which stabilized ML-DSA-65 as a first-class transaction-signature and access-key scheme. NEAR stores its much larger post-quantum public keys on-chain as 32-byte SHA3-256 hashes and charges an additional 100 Ggas for signature verification. That design brings quantum-resistant authorization into production while accounting for the higher computational and storage costs associated with post-quantum cryptography.
Accounts Can Add Quantum-Resistant Keys Without Moving Assets
NEAR’s account architecture makes the migration comparatively flexible because an account can contain multiple access keys rather than deriving its identity permanently from one cryptographic key. Users can add an ML-DSA-65 key to an existing account without transferring assets to a newly created address, reducing one of the operational risks that can accompany large-scale cryptographic migrations.
The algorithm itself is no longer experimental cryptography. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology formally standardized ML-DSA under FIPS 204 in August 2024, deriving it from CRYSTALS-Dilithium. NIST says ML-DSA is designed to remain secure against adversaries equipped with a large-scale quantum computer, giving NEAR’s implementation a standardized security foundation rather than a proprietary post-quantum scheme.
The protection remains account-level rather than network-wide. NEAR’s validator consensus still relies on classical cryptography, so the mainnet upgrade should not be interpreted as making every layer of NEAR fully quantum-resistant. Extending post-quantum protection to consensus will require a substantially larger migration involving validator and block-production infrastructure.
Dynamic Resharding Arrives in the Same Upgrade
Nearcore 2.13.0 also stabilized dynamic resharding, allowing shards to split automatically at epoch boundaries according to runtime state size. The network can now adjust its shard structure as demand grows without requiring a new protocol upgrade simply to introduce another hard-coded shard layout.
NEAR’s Chain Signatures infrastructure adds another consideration to the quantum roadmap. NEAR accounts can control assets on external networks through MPC-generated ECDSA or EdDSA signatures, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and other chains. A quantum-safe NEAR account does not automatically make those destination-chain signatures quantum-safe, because external networks continue to rely on their own cryptographic standards.
The current milestone is therefore substantial but deliberately incomplete. NEAR has moved standardized post-quantum signatures from research into live user-account security while leaving consensus and cross-chain cryptography as separate migration challenges. The next phase will determine whether that account-level protection can expand across the rest of the protocol without imposing unacceptable performance or operational costs.
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