NEAR Protocol is preparing to become one of the first major Layer-1 blockchains to ship a post-quantum-safe signing scheme, with a testnet launch planned before the end of Q2 2026.
The announcement came in a blog post authored by Anton Astafiev, CTO at Near One, who warned that the blockchain industry can no longer treat the quantum threat as a distant problem. “Progress has recently accelerated and things that seemed years away have been achieved in months,” Astafiev wrote. “As an industry, we can no longer assume we have time to figure things out or that a working quantum computer is decades away.”
NEAR’s Structural Advantage: Decoupled Accounts
Unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum, where wallet addresses are cryptographically tied to breakable elliptic-curve keypairs, NEAR’s account model was designed from inception with future quantum safety in mind. Every NEAR account uses human-readable IDs and is controlled through rotatable “access keys” rather than being permanently bound to a single keypair.
This design means that once the new signing scheme goes live, any NEAR account holder will be able to run a single transaction to rotate their keys to a quantum-safe scheme — no address migration required.
NEAR currently supports two signing schemes: EdDSA (Ed25519) by default and ECDSA (secp256k1). Neither is quantum-safe. The Near One team chose to start with FIPS-204 (ML-DSA, formerly known as CRYSTALS-Dilithium), a lattice-based digital signature algorithm that was formally standardized by NIST in August 2024 as part of the agency’s first batch of post-quantum cryptography standards.
Wallets, Hardware, and the Downstream Ripple Effect
Astafiev acknowledged that adding the signing scheme at the protocol level is the comparatively easy part. The harder challenge is the entire downstream stack — wallets, APIs, hardware devices, and user workflows — all of which will need to accommodate significantly larger key and signature sizes.
Near One is already working with both software and hardware wallet builders, including Ledger, to align on post-quantum plans. Astafiev flagged hardware wallets as a particularly urgent area: current crypto hardware wallets do not support quantum-safe signing at all, and it may not be physically possible for all existing devices 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,” the blog stated.
NEAR Intents and Cross-Chain Quantum Safety
The quantum push extends beyond the base protocol. The Defuse team, which operates the NEAR Intents cross-chain swap infrastructure, is separately working to bring quantum-safe Chain Signatures to all Intents users regardless of which chain they originate from.
This could position NEAR as a quantum-safe haven for assets from other ecosystems. As Astafiev put it, “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.”
NEAR currently facilitates threshold signatures to over 35 chains via the Chain Signatures MPC network. Post-quantum MPC solutions are still in the research stage, but the Defuse team is actively working on securing consensus and offering quantum-safe options.
The Seed Phrase Safety Net
Near One is also researching an emergency fallback mechanism inspired by ideas from the Bitcoin ecosystem. The concept exploits the fact that most private keys are derived from a seed phrase via a hashing step—and hash functions are not broken by quantum computing.
Under this approach, if a quantum computer renders conventional signatures untrustworthy, the protocol could block standard transactions as a precaution but allow users to prove ownership through a zero-knowledge proof demonstrating knowledge of the original seed phrase. This would let rightful owners prove asset ownership without exposing their keys or seed.
Broader Industry Context
The announcement lands as the quantum threat timeline for crypto continues to compress. Google Quantum AI’s March 2026 paper estimated that breaking 256-bit elliptic-curve cryptography could require roughly 20 times fewer resources than previously believed. Google has set a 2029 internal deadline for migrating its own systems to post-quantum cryptography.
Meanwhile, a Coinbase advisory board panel—including Stanford’s Dan Boneh and Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake—recently concluded that a quantum computer powerful enough to break blockchain encryption will eventually be built, and migration must begin now. Ethereum formed a dedicated Post-Quantum Security team in January 2026, while Solana, XRPL, and Algorand have each published their own PQ roadmaps.
NEAR is currently trading around $1.51, up roughly 19% in the past 24 hours amid a broader altcoin rally driven by geopolitical tailwinds.
Also Read: EXCLUSIVE: Coinbase Outlines Multi-Year Quantum Migration Plan to User Assets
