Anton Astafiev, CTO at Near One, and Mally Anderson, writer at NEAR
Thanks to NEAR Intents, NEAR now moves a significant share of cross-chain volume across all of crypto. The lesser-known pillar of NEAR’s cross-chain infrastructure is Chain Signatures. In the 2.5 years since Chain Signatures first launched, it has continued to evolve, adding new features and increasing decentralization and security of the MPC (multiparty computation) network. Last week, NEAR Foundation announced that NEAR MPC runs with 17 independent operators on mainnet and will be sustainably funded by protocol emissions.
MPC networks secure a growing share of crypto’s cross-chain activity, and most of them require trusting the operator set. The NEAR MPC network recently achieved a second milestone: all Chain Signatures operations now run inside TEEs (trusted execution environments), enabling independent on-chain verification and further upgrading security. These advances make the NEAR MPC the most decentralized and secure, and the only verifiable, MPC network we know of today and the only one running on fully encrypted hardware, by independent operators.
The Evolution of Chain Signatures
Chain Signatures first launched in Q1 2024 and were a key pillar of NEAR pioneering the Chain Abstraction movement for Web3: the idea that cross-chain UX like bridges, gas, and wrapped tokens put a high burden of complexity and security risk on the user while fragmenting liquidity across a balkanized crypto landscape. Instead, the NEAR ecosystem posited that users should be able to do whatever they want across chains and go where the liquidity is.
Using a decentralized MPC network and threshold signatures, Chain Signatures allow a NEAR account to sign transactions for any blockchain. This enabled not only bridgeless DeFi across chains, but also multi-chain account abstraction, or managing accounts/assets from multiple chains from a single NEAR account. Chain Signatures was also one of the first tools to unlock liquidity for non-smart contract chains like Bitcoin and bring them into the DeFi landscape.
Chain Signatures helped pave the way for NEAR Intents (which launched in November 2024) and powers all the network’s cross-chain volume: more than $35 billion in all-time volume in less than two years. Virtually all BTC and Solana cross-chain flow now moves through the NEAR MPC-powered Omnibridge. Chain Signatures enables cross-chain transactions without a bridge or custodian in the middle, while Intents handles the requests and coordinates their fulfillment. (For a deeper review of how Chain Signatures work, see the documentation.)
In 2025, the Near One team implemented CKD, or Confidential Key Derivation, for the Chain Signatures MPC. (For a technical deep dive on this topic, see Near One’s blog post.) CKD derives a secret key for any application that the app can use for whatever purpose – for example, signing or encryption. This key is derived in a way that prevents any of the operators from knowing it, and no single failure or compromise can move funds. The keys are protected against corruption by any individual node and can be used for signing as well as for encryption and decryption. This enables trusted training of models inside TEEs, persistent AI Agents, encrypted storage across TEEs, generating verifiable randomness, and many other applications.
New Milestones: TEEs and Increasing Decentralization
The Chain Signatures MPC now runs on mainnet with a required signing threshold of 11 out of 17 nodes, populated by many of the most reputable operators in the industry. This makes Chain Signatures the most decentralized MPC network we know of today. The security overview (including the full audit report of every operator, feature, and code path by Trail of Bits) and list of participants is enforced onchain and viewable on a public page. Operators include SVRN, Bitwise, Nansen, Greenfield, Everstake, Near One, and Luganodes.
Chain Signatures MPC network operations now run inside TEEs (trusted execution environments), enabling independent onchain verification via cryptographic proof. We do not know of another decentralized MPC network running inside fully encrypted hardware, in NEAR’s case Intel TDX. NEAR AI already operates confidential inference in TEEs (the documentation provides a high-level explanation of TDX and how they work). Even if an individual node is compromised, they wouldn’t be able to access
Each operator also runs a full NEAR node and only signs transactions that come from an onchain request. The participants operate inside secure enclaves to prevent arbitrary code manipulation and ensure the nodes strictly validate on-chain transaction flows. Not only does this make the MPC network more secure, but it also enables verification of all operations to enhance trust in the network.
This combination of encrypted hardware, verifiability, and decentralization of independent operators make Chain Signatures a truly unique MPC network, pushing the bounds of this technology. The new network architecture also enables a more secure approach to foreign chain transactions via Read MPC, which requires MPC operators to query a white-listed quorum of RPC providers (at least 3 out of 5) to verify cross-chain deposits before initiating threshold signing. This method is more secure than simply using RPCs, with additional safety from using TEEs. It also enables fast, non-custodial onboarding of new chains without requiring light client implementations, so the NEAR Intents system –– which already supports more than 35 networks –– can securely and easily add more chains and assets over time.
What’s Ahead
The network architecture of the Chain Signatures MPC supports the addition of more operators over time. The tradeoff between adding reputable nodes and maintaining the speed and latency requirements required for performance makes this a low priority for now––indeed, the recent milestone of 17 signers goes far beyond most MPC networks’ security requirements. But the option exists if the requirements shift.
The Near One team is also actively researching ways to secure the MPC network for the post-quantum era. There are not yet any practical post-quantum solutions for threshold signing that are ready to be put into production, and the Near One team estimates that they are at least a year away. CKD is also based on threshold signing and uses recovery keys that are not post-quantum secure. These are active research topics for Near One as the field of post-quantum cryptography evolves. In the meantime, NEAR account holders can secure their assets by updating their keys to be post-quantum secure.
Given the growth of NEAR Intents and the importance of cross-chain infrastructure to the overall NEAR Protocol and ecosystem, continuing to upgrade the NEAR MPC and Chain Signatures will be a top priority for Near One. For now, the network has achieved a degree of decentralization, security, and resilience that sets a new standard for Web3 and extends NEAR’s standard of independent onchain verifiability to all Chain Signatures operations.
