Anton Astafiev, CTO at Near One, and Mally Anderson, writer at NEAR
NEAR began its post-quantum security upgrades in Q2 2026. Step one was updating NEAR to support its first quantum-safe signature scheme––ML-DSA, or Dilithium––so users can protect and hold their assets in a post-quantum-secure way, including those from other chains via Chain Signatures and NEAR Intents.
With this new signing scheme, NEAR became one of the first blockchains to support post-quantum signing and advance towards post-quantum readiness. While securing users’ assets is a critical step to prepare for the post-quantum era, there is more work ahead to make the NEAR Protocol, stack, and entire ecosystem quantum-secure.
This post lays out the full NEAR post-quantum roadmap and dependencies for the next year and beyond.
Securing Users’ Assets and Private Keys
With ML-DSA signing added to the protocol, the next steps are optimization and expanding support. Several NEAR ecosystem wallets and cross-chain infrastructure providers are updating to support quantum signing on NEAR, with Meteor Wallet live and others coming soon, including Ledger. The NEAR One team is working on improving efficiency (since post-quantum signatures are much larger than other schemes) and eventually adding more quantum-safe signature schemes. If more efficient schemes emerge, Near One will strongly consider adding them as well, but wouldn’t rush into it without broader adoption since ML-DSA is already supported. Currently under consideration is Falcon (FN-DSA), a more compact lattice-based signature scheme.
In addition to securing users’ NEAR accounts, adding post-quantum signing on NEAR means that users can secure assets on 30+ other chains with their NEAR account, thanks to Chain Signatures. This way, their assets are backed up in a quantum-safe environment even if those chains have not yet upgraded to post-quantum.
Expanding usage and efficiency of post-quantum signing couples with Near One’s emerging work on Universal Account IDs, currently planned for inclusion in the next protocol update in autumn 2026. This will enable a single scheme (i.e. not tied to a specific signature scheme) that can be initialized with any code on transfer for simpler cross-chain experiences––and even off-chain experiences via NEP-641. These can also be extended to include any new signature schemes in the future.
Securing Consensus and the Core Protocol
The next step in the roadmap is securing post-quantum consensus in order for validators and chunk producers to use post-quantum signatures. While validators can now use post-quantum keys to secure their accounts, that is limited to authorizing transactions and confirming that they are staking. The protocol itself still uses the Edison curve for block production and other functions. Validator keys that are used for consensus must also be updated to post-quantum security: it is a requirement for securing the protocol in a post-quantum future. This requires optimizing post-quantum cryptography performance and the design of the NEAR network – a major undertaking and one of the most fundamental changes to the protocol since mainnet.
If the cryptography were sufficiently mature, Near One could secure post-quantum consensus by the end of 2026, but the state of the art in the field of cryptography is still too early. Securing consensus is much more complex than securing accounts for a few reasons: 1) ML-DSA, NEAR’s first adopted signing scheme, is too cost-intensive and large to use for consensus 2) adopting a newer or less proven scheme introduces potential risk and 3) other performant signing schemes such as Falcon, while very promising, are not yet considered sufficiently mature for adoption. Consensus is compute-intensive and uses a lot of bandwidth, which makes quantum cryptography much more challenging overall than today’s cryptography for elliptic and Edison curves. We will likely even see different hardware emerge over time to reflect this new computing challenge.
The Near One team currently expects a solution to be ready in 12 months, with post-quantum consensus ready by the end of 2027. Existing post-quantum signing schemes will likely get more efficient and cheaper over time, or entirely new cryptography could emerge, but for now, this is an active research topic and a priority for Near One. Other ecosystems are taking different approaches, such as choosing to adopt Falcon signatures or using zero-knowledge proofs on top of post-quantum cryptography (this is the current plan for Ethereum). While Near One is not choosing either of these routes for NEAR, it’s important for Web3 projects to collaborate on this research and maintain an open discussion. Every decision one chain makes will affect all the others in our multichain environment.
Securing Cross-Chain and NEAR Intents
Cross-chain connectivity is a major consideration for post-quantum blockchains and particularly for NEAR: we consider these updates just as important as the core protocol. Web3 has finally left the era of fragmentation behind and has achieved positive network effects thanks to more secure and seamless multichain infrastructure, including NEAR Intents. So any post-quantum solution must not break the ease of cross-chain activity for users.
Each blockchain will choose its own approach to post-quantum security and may select different signature schemes. In today's world just two cryptography schemes – ECDSA and EdDSA – cover the majority of blockchains, making integration relatively simple. But there is more risk of fragmentation if different chains take widely different approaches to post-quantum cryptography. Because supporting cross-chain via Chain Signatures and NEAR Intents is now a core part of the NEAR ecosystem, updating these to post-quantum as chains migrate is a top priority in 2026 and into 2027. As of August 2026, the Responsible Finance Institute and custody solution Safeheron are already using the NEAR testnet to evaluate post-quantum cryptography for transfers and wallet creation.
The exact timing of cross-chain infrastructure updates naturally depends on other chains’ own post-quantum roadmaps. Transacting across blockchains requires different types of transactions and signing: those initiating from another chain to NEAR, and those from NEAR to another chain. The former are technically simpler to update; this will be an ongoing process in 2027 as the other chains begin to update their schemes. NEAR will need updated host functions to support on-chain verification of the post-quantum consensus signatures chosen by other chains via NEAR Intents and OmniBridge.
Transactions initiating from NEAR onto another chain involve the MPC network signing foreign chain transactions. The MPC uses threshold signing, which today works with ECDSA and EdDSA but will need to be updated to support the quantum-safe signing that the foreign chain expects. This is trickier to upgrade, because threshold signing for post-quantum is nowhere near mature – it’s infeasibly resource-intensive and expensive and it supports overall fewer signers, which is an unwelcome tradeoff. There aren’t any candidate solutions yet, so this update doesn’t have a concrete timeline.
Post-quantum threshold signing will eventually emerge, but it is at least a year-plus away. It also requires different chains to adopt compatible schemes – for example, if Bitcoin and Ethereum choose to continue pursuing hash-based signatures in the post-quantum era, it will be more difficult to achieve secure and smooth flows between chains. Reducing security is obviously not desirable, which is why communication between protocol teams is critical in the next couple of years: the entire blockchain space depends on preserving both security and interoperability in the post-quantum era. Publishing this roadmap is itself part of that effort: NEAR is committed to working alongside other protocol teams to reach the post-quantum era together, and to helping set the standards that make cross-ecosystem security possible.
Confidential key derivation, or CKD, is also based on threshold signing. These are recovery keys that are meant to be permanent, but they are not post-quantum secure. While this is new technology without much adoption yet, they do power TEE-enabled execution and are therefore important to the confidential agentic landscape. The NEAR one team is currently researching Hermine, a new privacy-preserving secure communication protocol. Updating CKD is high-priority and NEAR will provide a quantum-secure solution, but there is no timeline yet.
Ongoing Research and Considerations
In summary, Near One is actively building and researching post-quantum-secure solutions across the protocol, cross-chain infrastructure, TEE execution, and more, with major upgrades planned in 2027. While progress is being made on all of these dimensions, the work is not just internal to NEAR, and external dependencies affect the possible timelines of the roadmap.
Security-related upgrades require sufficient confidence in the adopted cryptography and chosen solutions. There is always some risk in adopting new cryptography and the Near One team would never do so without thorough review and research. Even NIST-approved schemes have been broken in the past, though this often takes years or decades and there would likely be advance warning if that were on the horizon. Every NEAR Protocol upgrade goes through rigorous review and auditing before it reaches mainnet, with staged rollout to manage any potential risk. The Near One team is dedicated to keeping up with the newest cryptographic research and to maximizing collaboration to ensure that any facet of the chain or cross-chain infra that can be confidently post-quantum secured, will be in a timely fashion. But NEAR does not exist in a bubble and these updates also depend on outside forces, from the cryptographic research itself, to the standardization process, to coordinating support across hardware and wallets, to collaborating with other blockchains on updating compatibility.
AI is also an acceleration factor for compromising cryptography. For example, the Hawk signature scheme’s security assumptions were recently broken with the help of AI. While AI doesn’t change the fundamentals of post-quantum security, it’s a consideration for anyone watching the countdown clock to advanced quantum computing.
Near One will continue to share progress updates and technical details as roadmap milestones are achieved and post-quantum landmarks arrive into 2027 and beyond. While the quantum threat is getting closer, taking a careful and confident approach is more important than speed at this point – now that NEAR accounts and users’ assets are post-quantum secure.
The Roadmap
Disclaimer
This blog post is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It describes NEAR's current post-quantum research and development plans, which are subject to change. The roadmap items, timelines, and technical approaches outlined here are forward-looking and depend on factors outside NEAR's control, including the maturity of the underlying cryptographic research, ongoing standardization processes, hardware and wallet support, and coordination across other blockchains. Nothing here should be read as a promise, guarantee, or projection that any particular feature, scheme, or milestone will ship on any specific timeline, or at all.
Nothing in this post constitutes investment, financial, legal, or technical advice, or a solicitation or offer to buy or sell any tokens, digital assets, or securities. Readers should conduct their own independent research and consult professional advisors before making any decisions related to digital assets or blockchain networks.
