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NEAR Protocol to Implement Post-Quantum Cryptography This Month
- The co-founder of $NEAR has confirmed the timeline for deploying post-quantum signatures on the network’s testnet.
- This is expected to happen in June 2026.
- The new features will then be implemented on the mainnet, although the final timeline has not yet been disclosed.
The $NEAR Protocol blockchain will implement post-quantum cryptography measures by the end of Q2 2026, meaning as early as this month. This was stated by the project’s co-founder Illia Polosukhin.
Solving quantum algorithms with AI by @eigencloud. Science is accelerating and open source is going to drive that.
$NEAR is shipping post quantum crypto end of Q2 to make sure everyone has time to upgrade. https://t.co/m3V4W3Wxsj
— Illia (root.near) (🇺🇦, ⋈) (@ilblackdragon) June 2, 2026
Some Context
Bitcoin and most other crypto assets use cryptographic encryption based on elliptic curves (ECDSA/secp256k1). It can be broken using Shor’s algorithm, but doing so would require a quantum computer.
At the end of March 2026, Google published a report on the quantum threat. The main conclusion of the work was that breaking 256-bit elliptic-curve cryptography would require 20 times fewer quantum resources than was believed in 2019 — fewer than 500,000 physical qubits.
The company developed two quantum algorithms, one public and one private. One uses fewer than 1,200 logical qubits and 90 million Toffoli gates to perform the attack, while the other uses 1,450 qubits and 70 million Toffoli gates, respectively. As confirmation, the organisation provided a zero-knowledge cryptographic proof (ZKP).
Polosukhin, in turn, commented on a post by Sreeram Kannan, the founder of the EigenCloud project. Kannan shared on his page the results of cryptography experiments conducted by two Eigen Labs team members — Gautam Ananth and Gajesh Naik.
The former is an undergraduate student with no experience or education in quantum technologies. Using a subscription to the OpenAI Codex service, he managed to improve Google’s public algorithm twofold, reaching 50% of the private one.
Ananth launched the ecdsa.fail platform, where anyone could connect their AI agents to the repository and try to improve the result. Naik used a swarm — multiple models working together — and reached 80% of the potential of Google’s classified algorithm.
The company had previously stated that the day when cryptography becomes vulnerable to a quantum computer would arrive in 2029. Kannan emphasised that the research he published proves the validity of this forecast.
“To clarify, this in itself will not lead to Bitcoin being hacked. It reduces the number of qubits and logical gates needed to build a quantum computer capable of doing so and, therefore, accelerates the development of quantum technologies. In any case, the Bitcoin community should now think about the post-quantum cryptography period,” the EigenCloud founder stressed.
What Approach Is $NEAR Protocol Taking?
After Google’s report was released, in early May 2026, Anton Astafyev, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the Near One studio, published a note on the project’s blog about the network’s transition to post-quantum cryptography.
“As an industry, we can no longer assume that we have time to figure everything out, or that a working quantum computer will appear only decades from now,” he stressed.
According to the article, the network uses EdDSA (Ed25519) by default and supports ECDSA (secp256k1). Neither encryption method is resistant to quantum attacks.
In the future, the network is expected to transition to the FIPS-204 algorithm (ML-DSA, formerly known as CRYSTALS-Dilithium). This approach is based on mathematical lattices rather than elliptic curves. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) approved it in August 2025.
At the same time, $NEAR’s architecture differs from that of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Accounts on the network are not tied to a pair of keys — public and private.
In the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains, a user’s wallet address is a mathematical derivative of the private key. The distinctive feature of $NEAR is that two such access keys can be linked to an account — one with full functionality and one with limited functionality.
When implementing the FIPS-204 algorithm, the user only needs to add one more key based on ML-DSA. In that case, the transaction will be signed with a quantum-resistant signature type.
This makes it possible to avoid mass migration and a hard fork, but at the same time creates new difficulties, primarily related to size. ML-DSA signatures are heavier than Ed25519 signatures — 2,420 bytes compared with 64 bytes.
This increases the computing power requirements for processing blocks and, as a result, will affect gas fees. According to Astafyev, updating the network is not difficult; implementing the new feature across the entire stack is much harder.
According to Polosukhin, the new approach will be deployed by the end of Q2 2026, that is, in June, on the testnet. The mainnet upgrade will depend on the results of the first stage and the effectiveness of the new method.
Against the backdrop of Polosukhin’s statement and other changes in the ecosystem, the network’s native token showed positive momentum. On the daily chart, the gain is 7.7%, while on the weekly chart it is more than 10%.
Daily $NEAR/USDT chart on the Binance exchange. Source: TradingView.
It is also worth noting that Coinbase previously published a report on the quantum threat and measures to prevent it across different networks.
See also: "El Salvador Continued Buying Bitcoin During the Market Decline"
