NEAR Protocol Mainnet Upgrade Adds Post-Quantum Signatures and Dynamic Resharding

NEAR Protocol’s mainnet has completed its 2.13 upgrade, introducing the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology-certified post-quantum signature scheme FIPS-204 (ML-DSA). The upgrade makes NEAR one of the first L1 blockchains to deploy anti-quantum signatures in a mainnet production environment. According to Foresight News, the update allows accounts to rotate keys to post-quantum algorithms to help defend against future attacks from quantum computers on existing signature methods. The 2.13 release also adds Dynamic Resharding, which lets the network automatically split and expand when a single shard reaches a preset state-size threshold. According to Foresight News, the process requires no manual intervention or protocol vote and takes about 1.5 epochs to complete, with NEAR Intents and near.com able to scale automatically based on demand. NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin said the upgrade provides scalable on-chain infrastructure with a quantum-safe foundation for the agent economy.