NEAR Protocol is Quietly Doing What Every Blockchain Should – Before It’s Too Late

NEAR Protocol targets Q2 2026 for NIST-approved post-quantum signatures as quantum computing threats to blockchain cryptography accelerate faster than expected.

The timeline moved faster than most people expected. Milestones that looked years out arrived in months, and the quantum threat that was once theoretical is now showing up in research papers from Google’s own Quantum AI team.

NEAR Protocol is not waiting around.

The Near One team published a detailed roadmap on May 6, outlining steps to make NEAR accounts post-quantum safe. The first move: deploying FIPS-204 on testnet before Q2 2026 closes. That is the ML-DSA scheme, formerly known as Dilithium, and it carries NIST approval for post-quantum cryptography.

Why Most Chains Cannot Do What NEAR Is Doing

The account model matters here. Bitcoin and Ethereum tie wallet addresses directly to cryptographic keypairs. That coupling is the problem. Break the cryptography and the address goes with it.

NEAR was designed differently. Accounts use rotatable access keys and are not bound to any single keypair. A user could simply run one transaction to swap their existing keys for quantum-resistant ones once the update ships.

As ilblackdragon noted on X, the protocol was built from the start with the expectation that cryptography would eventually need to change. “We knew there would be a need to expand the cryptography set,” the post read, “so NEAR allows multiple signing schemes by design.” The team is treating this spring’s release as the first in a series.

NEAR already runs two signing schemes, EdDSA and ECDSA, neither quantum-safe. Adding a third was always part of the architecture.

The Parts Nobody Is Talking About Yet

Adding the signing scheme to the protocol is, in the words of the Near One team, the simple part.

Wallets are harder. Software wallets need to expose new APIs and support larger key sizes. Hardware wallets face an even steeper climb. Near One confirmed it is already in conversation with Ledger, among others, to align on post-quantum plans. Some hardware wallets may not support the new schemes at all, which the team flagged as one of the more consequential research areas ahead.

The quantum pressure across the industry has been building since Google published its research. Google itself has set a 2029 migration target. NEAR is not waiting that long.

Chain Signatures, which routes threshold signatures across 35-plus chains via the MPC network, faces its own post-quantum challenge. The Defuse team is working on that separately, trying to bring quantum-safe signatures to NEAR Intents users regardless of which chain they’re coming from.

There is also an ongoing research thread around zero-knowledge proofs. The idea: if a quantum computer eventually breaks key derivation, users could prove ownership of their seed phrase using a ZK proof without exposing keys. The seed hashing step is not broken by quantum computing. That distinction matters.

NEAR intends to publish deeper technical breakdowns at blog.nearone.org as work progresses.

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