By Anton Astafiev, CTO at Near One
Quantum computing poses a threat to every blockchain protocol. Progress has recently accelerated (this recent paper on safeguarding cryptocurrency from Google’s Quantum AI team got a lot of attention) and things that seemed years away have been achieved in months. As an industry, we can no longer assume we have time to figure things out or that a working quantum computer is decades away.
What exactly does the quantum threat to blockchains look like? Whether the attack vector is from advanced AI models or from people spending more time working on increasingly powerful quantum computers, blockchain signature schemes could be breakable and private keys easily derived from private keys. (Post-quantum-safe cryptography exists, but today’s blockchains aren’t using it.) While the industry has known this since its inception with Bitcoin nearly two decades ago, quantum computing has seemed far enough away to justify deferring work on the problem. Investing in quantum safety isn’t a product, it doesn’t bring more customers or more revenue, and it’s extremely complex.
Leaders from across Near One, NEAR Intents, and the NEAR Foundation believe that the NEAR ecosystem is uniquely positioned to lead the way toward the post-quantum future. This post unpacks the unique features of NEAR Protocol that can already make accounts and assets more quantum-secure, as well as upcoming updates and research to accelerate the transition. We hope this effort from NEAR will push the rest of the blockchain industry to start preparing for the post-quantum era and offer options to users from across ecosystems.
Securing the NEAR Protocol and NEAR Accounts
The Near One team is working on longer-term research to secure the NEAR Protocol: consensus, signing, validators, epoch sync, and sending transactions will all work differently once quantum computing arrives. Every blockchain will eventually need to make these major updates and NEAR is starting the work now to ensure that such a challenging and resource-intensive migration will only need to happen once. We want to create something future-proof that will last for decades.
While this research is ongoing, NEAR is also well-positioned to adapt as the state of the art evolves. Unlike most earlier blockchains, NEAR has had human readable account IDs by design since the beginning. In fact, this design was created by the early NEAR team with future quantum safety in mind. Unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum, where the addresses of the blockchain are tied to breakable cryptography, NEAR accounts are decoupled from cryptography: every account can hold a smart contract and is controlled through rotatable “access keys” rather than being bound to a single keypair. (Read more about the NEAR account model here.)
This flexible account model offers some creative ways to adapt to new quantum-resistant technologies as they develop. Today, your account is secured by your access keys. NEAR already supports two signing schemes, neither of which is quantum safe: NEAR defaults to EdDSA (Ed25519) and also supports ECDSA (secp256k1). Since there are already multiple, adding another is feasible by design.
The Near One team is currently working on adding the first post-quantum-safe signing scheme for implicit accounts and for user signing schemes, currently planned to launch on testnet by the end of Q2 2026. They decided to start with FIPS-204 (ML-DSA, prev. Dilithium), a lattice-based signature scheme that is NIST-approved for post-quantum cryptography.
This update will enable anyone on NEAR to simply run a transaction and rotate their keys to become quantum safe. While it’s the first of many steps towards preparing the ecosystem for the quantum future, it allows NEAR account holders to prepare today while the team is securing the protocol in parallel. It’s also valuable to see what works and what doesn’t as early as possible, i.e. how do bigger keys work in practice and which downstream updates will be required to accommodate them.
Beyond the Protocol: Wallets and NEAR Intents
Adding signing schemes is relatively simple compared to everything else that needs to change as a result of this addition. Importantly, wallets will need to support new quantum-safe signing schemes. Unless the protocol’s changing endpoints and APIs are made available to wallet builders, account owners won’t be able to use them. As new types of signatures and contracts emerge, they will all require updates and NEAR’s approach will be to push them forward incrementally. The size of the keys and signatures in new schemes is likely to be much larger, so workflows will need to evolve accordingly. Getting this right will require close work between protocol and wallet teams as well as directly with users over time; some collaborations are already in progress.
Hardware wallets will also require major changes: today’s crypto hardware wallets do not support quantum-safe signing or features, and it may not even be possible for all of them to do so. Rather than waiting for the ecosystem to realize this is a problem, the goal is to collaborate with hardware wallet manufacturers to bring new solutions to the market as soon as possible. Near One is already working with both software and hardware wallet builders to align on post-quantum plans, including Ledger. Given the critical role hardware wallets play for cryptoasset holders in maintaining security, this will be one of the most important areas of research in the next few years and the NEAR team aims to set the standard.
In addition to single signers, NEAR also supports threshold signatures to 35+ chains via the Chain Signatures MPC network. Some post-quantum solutions exist, but are still in the research stage. The Defuse team is actively working on securing consensus and offering quantum-safe Chain Signatures to all NEAR Intents users no matter which chains they’re coming from. This not only ensures security of the protocol but can also offer users from other ecosystems a place to back up their assets in a quantum-safe environment. If other ecosystems are slow to make advancements like adopting new signing schemes for contracts, or their contracts don’t have time to migrate, NEAR Protocol and Intents contracts will be quantum safe in the mid-term.
The NEAR One team is conducting further security research inspired by an idea from the Bitcoin ecosystem. The current assumption is that as soon as there is a quantum computer, private keys will be extractable and today’s cryptography will be broken. When that happens, we won’t be able to tell if someone running a transaction is the rightful owner of the asset or not. Protocols will face the challenge of deciding to either block all assets at this moment, or enter a wild west.
But many private keys are backed by a seed phrase and there is a hashing step between the keys and the seed which is not broken by quantum computing. So the protocol could block regular transactions out of caution but allow a user to prove with a zero-knowledge proof that they know the original seed phrase that enables derivation of the private key, they can prove they’re the rightful owner of an asset while keeping their keys and seed protected. This is one example of how research across blockchain ecosystems is essential and valuable as everyone prepares for quantum unknowns.
The Quantum Future Is NEAR
While quantum computing poses a global security threat to blockchains, good research is underway to make sure it’s not all over the moment the quantum computer arrives. Thanks to the flexibility of the protocol and the strength of the protocol team, NEAR is well-positioned to lead the way in the quantum transition by adding quantum-safe signing and wants to push projects in the ecosystem to start taking action today. The Near One team will share updates and deeper technical details on their research in the coming months at https://blog.nearone.org/ for those interested, as will the Defuse team for updates on Chain Signatures and NEAR Intents.
