NEAR this upgrade has packed in both quantum-resistant signatures and dynamic sharding, and Gas Keys can even get sponsorship involved—quite something.

NEAR core developer Vadim stated that NEAR has released mainnet upgrade version 2.13.0, adding support for NIST ML-DSA-65 post-quantum signatures as the third protocol key type; enabling dynamic resharding with automatic splitting of high-load shards at epoch boundaries. It introduces Gas Keys NEP-611, where keys have independent pre-deposited Gas balances and 1024 parallel nonce channels, and can be combined with DelegateV2 for Gas sponsorship. Contracts can assign deterministic yield IDs, and node state synchronization has been changed to a peer-to-peer mode.