NEAR Protocol has launched network upgrade 2.13 on its mainnet, adding NIST-approved quantum-safe signing and dynamic resharding.
NEAR Protocol has launched network upgrade 2.13 on its mainnet, adding quantum-safe signing through the NIST-approved FIPS-204 (ML-DSA) scheme and introducing dynamic resharding, a scalability enhancement that lets the protocol scale automatically as network demand grows.
The two upgrades are aimed at securing on-chain finance against post-quantum attacks while adding capacity that scales without manual intervention. With the 2.13 upgrade, NEAR becomes one of the first Layer-1 (L1) blockchains to bring a NIST-approved post-quantum signing scheme live on the mainnet, allowing accounts to rotate and protect their keys against future quantum attacks.
The upgrade decouples human-readable account IDs from the underlying cryptography via rotatable access keys, unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum, where addresses are derived directly from breakable key pairs. NEAR is also working with hardware and software wallet builders, including Ledger, to bring post-quantum support to market, and builders can rotate account keys to ML-DSA today using the NEAR CLI.
Dynamic resharding replaces a process that previously required a full protocol upgrade. Under the new system, a shard splits automatically once it reaches a defined state-size threshold, validated by state witnesses with no human intervention, in roughly 1.5 epochs. The change benefits NEAR’s infrastructure and consumer apps.
Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol, said: “With the 2.13 upgrade, NEAR now scales automatically as demand grows, and we’re laying the cryptographic foundation to secure agents transacting on-chain in the quantum era.”
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