NEAR Ships Post-Quantum Signatures, Auto-Resharding—Cardano Votes on Fees

Two major L1 upgrades landed this week, each solving a different bottleneck. Only one of them grapples with the existential threat to crypto’s cryptographic foundation.

NEAR Protocol’s mainnet upgrade 2.13 ships two production-ready primitives: post-quantum signing and automatic dynamic resharding. Accounts can now rotate keys to the NIST-approved FIPS-204 (ML-DSA) scheme via the NEAR CLI, decoupling account identity from cryptography [^claim_2415]. This isn’t a theoretical proposal — it’s live on mainnet. Any NEAR account can become quantum-resistant today. The timing is pointed: Google’s Quantum AI team estimates roughly $470 billion of Bitcoin is at risk from sufficiently powerful quantum computers that can break current signature schemes [^claim_2421]. NEAR’s move creates a comparative benchmark for every L1 and L2 that has deferred post-quantum migration.

Dynamic resharding removes the other scalability bottleneck. When a shard hits a defined state-size threshold, it splits deterministically, validated by state witnesses in roughly 1.5 epochs — no manual protocol upgrade required [^claim_2416]. Capacity becomes an endogenous function of usage, not governance coordination. This builds on NEAR’s publicly verifiable 1M+ TPS benchmark and over five years of 100% mainnet uptime [^claim_2417]. For MEV searchers and rollup sequencers, shard splits change local congestion patterns; for cross-chain routing systems like NEAR Intents, the scaling is automatic. NEAR Intents and near.com, already built on sharded contracts, now inherit both automatic scaling and quantum-secure signing at the account level, letting users hold assets from any chain in a NEAR account with post-quantum protection [^claim_2422].

Cardano took a different path. The van Rossem hard fork upgraded mainnet from Protocol Version 10 to Version 11, introducing Plutus Cost Model enhancements expected to lower smart contract execution costs [^claim_2418]. This is Cardano’s first governance-driven hard fork — activation was driven by on-chain voting rather than coordinated solely by Input Output [^claim_2420]. The fork lays groundwork for the Dijkstra-era hard fork and Ouroboros Leios, a scaling proposal targeting late 2026 that aims to drastically increase TPS without weakening Ouroboros’ security guarantees [^claim_2419]. For DeFi on Cardano, lower per-transaction overhead changes the viability of complex strategies and oracle update frequency. For consensus researchers, Leios is a live testbed for high-throughput PoS under on-chain governance.

The contrast is instructive. NEAR delivers a vertically integrated stack — sharded, dynamically resharding infrastructure with quantum-safe signing — that directly addresses both scalability and cryptographic longevity. Cardano’s governance-driven path prioritizes decentralized decision-making for future upgrades. Both are live. The market will watch which model attracts the next wave of agentic and DeFi workflows.