NEAR Protocol Announces Support for Post-Quantum Signature Schemes, No Asset Migration Required

NEAR Protocol announced that NEAR accounts now support the post-quantum ML-DSA signature scheme, enabling users to complete key upgrades without any asset migration. Meanwhile, the NEAR One team is advancing the NEP-655 proposal, which derives implicit accounts via an initial state hash, storing assets behind the hash so that no public keys or key hashes are exposed on-chain. It is currently live on the testnet and expected to launch on the mainnet within weeks. Additionally, the team is designing NEAR Intents Wallet Contracts that support custom signature extensions (including ML-DSA and hash-based schemes), and developing a NEAR-based Q-day recovery registry for external chains that have not yet deployed PQ keys, allowing users to submit recovery keys in a rotatable hash format. NEAR noted that its quantum-safe design philosophy was integrated into its architecture planning as early as 2018.