NEAR Protocol Brings Quantum-Safe Signing to Mainnet

With the 2.13 upgrade, NEAR becomes one of the first blockchains to add a NIST-approved post-quantum signature scheme in production. The release also launches dynamic resharding, enabling the network to automatically scale as demand grows.

SAN FRANCISCO, July 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, NEAR Protocol launched network upgrade 2.13 on mainnet, adding quantum-safe signing through the NIST-approved FIPS-204 (ML-DSA) scheme and introducing dynamic resharding, a significant scalability enhancement that enables the protocol to automatically scale as network demand grows. Together, the two upgrades lay the foundation the wider crypto industry needs to keep onchain finance secure and support agentic volume: protection against post-quantum attacks, and capacity that scales without manual intervention.

Most major blockchains in production today sign transactions with cryptography that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could break. Recent research has moved the quantum threat closer: quantum capabilities that once seemed years away have arrived in months. Google's Quantum AI team has published on the risk to cryptocurrency directly, with an estimated $470 billion of Bitcoin at risk. The exposure has been known since Bitcoin's launch, but many protocols have deferred the fix, because quantum safety adds no features and no revenue while demanding deep and complex protocol changes. Several blockchain ecosystems have mapped quantum-safe cryptography as part of a multi-year overhaul still years from production. With the 2.13 upgrade, NEAR becomes one of the first layer-1 blockchains with a NIST-approved post-quantum signing scheme live on mainnet today, allowing accounts to rotate and protect their keys against future quantum attacks that could break today's signing methods.

NEAR's unique account model enables a seamless upgrade to quantum-safe signing. On blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum, addresses are derived from keypairs tied to breakable cryptography, so migrating to a new signing scheme means migrating the address itself. NEAR accounts are decoupled from cryptography: since mainnet launched in 2020, NEAR has used human-readable account IDs controlled through rotatable access keys, not bound to a single keypair. This design was created by the early NEAR team with future quantum safety in mind. NEAR is also actively working with hardware and software wallet builders, including Ledger, on bringing post-quantum support to the market. By adding a quantum-secure scheme at the account level first, and through NEAR Intents, which lets users hold assets from any chain in a NEAR account, NEAR offers the wider ecosystem the quantum-resistant foundation it needs. Builders on NEAR can rotate account keys to ML-DSA today using the NEAR CLI.

The 2.13 upgrade also brings dynamic resharding to mainnet. NEAR's sharded architecture scales horizontally by adding shards, but until now each addition required a full protocol upgrade: weeks of validator coordination, a vote, and a staged rollout. Dynamic resharding makes the process automatic. When a shard reaches a defined state-size threshold, it splits deterministically, validated by state witnesses with no human intervention, in roughly 1.5 epochs. With dynamic resharding now live, applications on NEAR scale at the pace their usage demands, and neither storage nor throughput blocks that growth. This directly benefits NEAR Intents, NEAR's cross-chain infrastructure already built on sharded contracts, and near.com, the consumer app it powers, both of which now scale automatically with demand. The upgrade builds on the optimizations behind NEAR's publicly verifiable 1M+ TPS benchmark and its move to sharded smart contracts, and it runs on a network with more than five years of 100% mainnet uptime.

"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."

Agentic commerce is projected to reach $5 trillion globally by 2030, and settling that volume requires infrastructure that can scale with demand and defend against long-term cryptographic risk. The 2.13 release notes are available at https://github.com/near/nearcore/releases.

Illia Polosukhin is available for interview upon request.

About NEAR

NEAR is the open infrastructure powering the agent economy. NEAR's vertically integrated stack connects NEAR Intents for cross-chain execution, NEAR AI for confidential and verifiable AI, IronClaw for secure agent infrastructure, and sharded, quantum-resistant blockchain infrastructure for 1M+ TPS scalability. near.com is NEAR's unified front-end: one account, 30+ chains, and confidential cross-chain swaps in a single interface. With $20B+ in cross-chain volume and AI integrations with Abound, Brave Nightly, the Government of Bermuda, OpenMind, Venice AI, and more, NEAR is where agents transact. Learn more at https://www.near.org/.

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SOURCE NEAR