NEAR Post-Quantum Cryptography Practice: The Next Generation Evolution Path of Public Chain Security Architecture

The threat narrative of quantum computing has been circulating in the crypto industry for years. But the change in 2026 is that the narrative has started to be translated into engineering action.

On May 7, NEAR Protocol officially announced that it is adding post-quantum cryptography support to the network. Near One CTO Anton Astafiev detailed the implementation plan in an official technical blog post, and simultaneously confirmed it publicly to the community on the X platform. According to the plan, this testnet version is targeted to go live by the end of Q2 2026, making NEAR one of the first mainstream public chains to systematically push post-quantum cryptography integration at the mainnet level.

The timing of this move is thought-provoking. Just a little over a month earlier, on March 30, 2026, Google Quantum AI, together with researchers from the Ethereum Foundation and Stanford University, released a white paper that sent shockwaves through the industry. The paper systematically assessed the resources required for quantum computers to break cryptocurrency cryptography and concluded that earlier estimates were reduced by about 20 times—breaking the 256-bit elliptic-curve cryptography relied on by Bitcoin and Ethereum might require fewer than 500,000 physical qubits. The same white paper further broadened the discussion of attacks, extending from cracking Bitcoin private keys to wider attack surfaces such as Ethereum smart contracts, staking consensus, and data availability sampling.

The shockwave from the news had not yet fully settled. On April 24, Italian independent researcher Giancarlo Lelli used publicly rentable quantum hardware to successfully crack a 15-bit elliptic-curve encrypted private key, earning a 1 BTC bounty set by Project Eleven. The contours of the quantum threat are moving from laboratory papers toward verifiable engineering boundaries.

NEAR’s announcement lands squarely in this context, and the underlying technical logic behind it is worth breaking down step by step.

What Has NEAR Done? Protocol-Level Integration of Post-Quantum Cryptography

According to Anton Astafiev’s technical article, NEAR Protocol currently supports two signature schemes: EdDSA (Ed25519) and ECDSA (secp256k1), and neither is quantum-safe. The core of this update is adding FIPS-204 (ML-DSA, formerly CRYSTALS-Dilithium) to the existing architecture. This is a lattice-based post-quantum signature scheme that has been approved by NIST and was formally standardized in August 2024 as one of NIST’s first post-quantum cryptography standards.

Once this scheme goes live, any NEAR account holder can complete key rotation by performing a single transaction and switch to a post-quantum secure signature scheme, without going through complex address migration procedures. Behind this design is the architectural advantage of NEAR’s account model. Unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum, NEAR’s account system is designed to be decoupled from cryptography: each account is controlled through a rotatable “Access Key,” rather than being permanently bound to a specific public/private key pair. This means that, for users, key rotation is simply a single on-chain transaction—no need to create new addresses, transfer assets, or modify smart contract interaction logic.

Anton Astafiev also specifically points out that NEAR’s early design team had already taken post-quantum security into consideration during the initial architecture design phase. This long-term foresight, in retrospect, forms a structural differentiating advantage for NEAR compared with other public chains.

It is also worth noting the synchronized follow-through in the wallet ecosystem. Near One has partnered with wallet developers such as Ledger (both hardware and software wallet providers) to jointly plan post-quantum support solutions. At present, most hardware wallets do not support quantum-safe signatures, and not all existing hardware devices have the necessary support capability. Near One’s strategy is to work directly with manufacturers to push new solutions into the market as quickly as possible.

On the cross-chain layer, NEAR’s chain signature (Chain Signature) MPC network currently supports threshold signatures for more than 35 public chains. The Defuse team is developing quantum-safe cross-chain signature solutions for NEAR Intents users, aiming to provide a quantum-secure environment for ecosystems that are slower to make progress in migrating to post-quantum cryptography. As Astafiev put it: “If other ecosystems are slow to adopt new signature schemes, or if they can’t migrate their contracts in time, NEAR Protocol and the Intents contracts will achieve quantum security in the medium term.”

Threat Panorama: How Close Is Quantum Computing, Really?

To understand the strategic significance of NEAR’s upgrade, it is first necessary to clarify the current coordinates of the evolution of quantum threats.

Project Eleven’s The Quantum Threat to Blockchains — 2026 Report, published in May 2026, provides the most systematic risk assessment framework available to date. The report states that once “cryptography-related quantum computers” (CRQC) appear, Shor’s algorithm can quickly break asymmetric encryption systems such as ECDSA and RSA. The report places the expected timing of Q-Day between 2030 and 2033.

The same report provides quantified vulnerability assessments for different public chains: Ethereum faces about 65% risk of quantum attacks, with critical exposure points including validator BLS public keys and KZG commitments introduced via EIP-4844, among multiple cryptographic layers. Solana, because its address structure directly contains public key information, has its Ed25519 system assessed as 100% quantum-vulnerable. Bitcoin, due to the structural characteristics of its UTXO model, has some buffer—public keys of unspent addresses are not necessarily exposed until spending—but wallets with exposed public keys (such as early P2PK addresses and reused traditional addresses) also face significant risk.

In addition, Coinbase’s Quantum Advisory Committee released a 50-page position paper in April 2026, further quantifying risk exposure: about 6.9 million BTC (approximately 32% of total supply) are stored in wallets whose public keys have already been exposed on-chain, making them high-risk exposure assets for quantum attacks. The paper also specifically highlights that PoS networks face more complex quantum attack paths than pure payment networks due to the additional exposure surfaces introduced by validator signature mechanisms.

For NEAR, this technical background provides the logical foundation for its preemptive layout: when the entire industry is still debating upgrade roadmaps, early movers will secure a stronger position in the long-term security narrative.

The Anti-Quantum Race Among Public Chains: Differentiation Is Worsening

NEAR is not the only participant in the anti-quantum track, but there is a clear divergence across public chains in both response pace and depth.

The Bitcoin community is studying multiple anti-quantum proposals, including BIP-360 introducing a new output type P2MR (Pay to Merkle Root), as well as adopting hash-based signature schemes such as SPHINCS+. However, there is no commitment to a comprehensive upgrade plan yet, and the biggest obstacle is the governance difficulty of coordinating a network-wide upgrade.

In March 2026, the Ethereum Foundation released the “Post-Quantum Ethereum” website, elevating quantum security to the top level of strategic priority and forming a quantum security team. Ethereum’s roadmap shows that Layer 1 upgrades may be realized in 2029, but a full migration across the execution layer is expected to extend further into the future.

Solana’s developer teams, Anza and Firedancer, have both proposed moving toward Falcon-512 quantum-safe signatures and deployed related signature schemes on testnets. However, Project Eleven’s experimental data indicates that after implementing quantum-safe signatures on the Solana network, this high-throughput blockchain’s transaction throughput drops by about 90%, and the post-quantum signature size is 20 to 40 times larger than existing schemes. The trade-off between performance and security poses an especially severe challenge for Solana.

It is also notable that Algorand, whose mainnet has already implemented post-quantum Falcon signatures, is seen as an early mover in this area. Circle’s Arc blockchain has also released a multi-stage roadmap covering the full technical stack, planning to expand from selective signature support at mainnet launch to a comprehensive upgrade for core infrastructure and validator authentication. Tron founder Justin Sun said that Tron plans to transition to a quantum-protection network in 2026, with the testnet launching in Q2 and the mainnet rolling out in Q3.

Comparison table of progress across major public chains:

NEAR’s differentiation advantage lies in the following: its account model architecture is forward-looking, resulting in a relatively low transition cost; its post-quantum support onboarding experience is comparatively simple; and its cross-chain quantum security solutions give it a unique positioning to cover users in other ecosystems.

But this is still a fast-moving field. The speed of progress and the effectiveness of implementation across different chains will continue to change. Whether NEAR’s first-mover advantage can be transformed into enduring competitive strength still needs to pass engineering validation through testnet launch and mainnet deployment.

Industry Impact Analysis: Reconstructing from Security Narratives to Valuation Logic

The real-world deployment of post-quantum cryptography is not only a technical upgrade—it may also reshape the underlying logic of competition among public chains.

First, security properties are shifting from implicit assumptions to explicit competitive elements. In the past, public chains’ security trust was mainly built on protocol runtime and economic incentives, with the reliability of underlying cryptography treated as an unquestioned premise. The emergence of quantum threats breaks this implicit assumption—cryptographic security can no longer be taken for granted. By proactively integrating post-quantum signature schemes, NEAR brings “quantum security” to the forefront as a branded differentiating capability, upgrading security itself from background infrastructure to a user-selectable feature demand.

Second, migration cost is becoming the core metric for measuring technical debt of public chains. Bitcoin’s slow progress due to the difficulty of coordinating network consensus, Solana’s performance conflicts arising from its design goals for high performance and low latency versus post-quantum signature bloat, and Ethereum’s multi-layer architecture requiring migration across multiple complex dimensions such as consensus, execution, and data availability—all illustrate the high costs of cryptographic upgrades. By contrast, NEAR’s architecture design gives it a first-mover advantage in this “cryptographic agility” race. Coinbase’s position paper explicitly states that post-quantum signature sizes are significantly larger than current schemes, creating trade-offs between transaction speed and storage costs, while coordinating upgrades across a decentralized ecosystem—where every wallet holder ultimately needs to take action—has no precedent in traditional finance.

This analytical framework suggests that future valuation logic for public chains may undergo structural adjustments: networks with verifiable migration paths, low migration costs, and clear timelines could gain a certain “security premium.” Especially as institutional capital continues to enter the crypto market, long-term security and upgradeability are increasingly becoming factors with growing weight in investment decision-making. This point is already reflected in the market reaction after NEAR’s announcement—its native token price rose accordingly, creating a positive resonance with mainstream narratives around artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

Worth noting is that, alongside its post-quantum upgrade, NEAR is also strengthening its narrative positioning toward artificial intelligence. The combination of quantum security and AI narratives opens a differentiated storytelling track for NEAR in its competition for Layer 1 leadership, which may positively affect its appeal to developers, enterprise customers, and long-term investors.

More broadly, the widespread adoption of post-quantum cryptography may trigger a reassessment of cross-chain security value. Once NEAR’s cross-chain quantum-safe solutions are operational, users on chains with slow migration progress may seek quantum-secure protection through NEAR’s Intents infrastructure. This “security radiation” effect could enable a new form of cross-chain value capture mechanism: networks with quantum security capabilities not only protect their own ecosystems, but also provide security infrastructure to other ecosystems through cross-chain interoperability—allowing them to occupy a higher tier in the value chain of the entire crypto economy. Of course, this projection depends heavily on the engineering rollout progress of cross-chain solutions, users’ willingness to migrate, and the overall intensity of quantum security anxiety across the industry.

Conclusion

Post-quantum cryptography is shifting from a specialized topic in the cryptography field to a real-world infrastructure competition in the crypto industry. NEAR Protocol’s FIPS-204 integration is not merely an announcement of a technical upgrade—it is a signal that the competitive dimension of public chains is extending from traditional tracks such as performance (TPS), ecosystems (applications and users), and capital efficiency to the next generation of security infrastructure upgrade capability.

Quantum computing will not crack all public chain private keys tomorrow, but it has already changed the rules of public chain competition. For long-term participants in the crypto industry, the focus may no longer be on which public chain “completes the upgrade fastest,” but rather on which one’s architecture provides the most elegant adaptation capability for a shift in the security paradigm—those networks that can continue evolving with minimal friction will hold a more favorable position in the years ahead.

The race for quantum security has just begun. And this time, NEAR has already taken the lead.