Banks don’t usually team up with regulators to test ways their own security could fail. But that’s exactly what happened this week. A coalition of banks and financial watchdogs launched a NEAR quantum-safe pilot to check whether blockchain wallets can survive a future quantum computer attack.
The Responsible Fintech Institute organized the project. Safeheron built the underlying technology. Two banks, Bison Bank and DK Bank, agreed to run live tests. Regulators from the Abu Dhabi Global Market, Bhutan’s Gelephu Financial Services Office, and the Malta Financial Services Authority are watching closely.
Why Quantum Computers Threaten Blockchain Today
Every blockchain wallet relies on cryptographic signatures to prove ownership. Today’s signatures use math that ordinary computers can’t crack. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could break that math and forge signatures, draining wallets without ever stealing a password.
That threat doesn’t exist yet. But institutions can’t wait until it does. Migrating billions of dollars in custody systems takes years, not months. This pilot builds that migration path now, while there’s still time to test it safely.
How the NEAR Quantum-Safe Pilot Works
Safeheron built its system around ML-DSA-65, a signature scheme NIST finalized in August 2024 as part of its FIPS 204 standard. The pilot pairs this new signature type with multiparty computation, so no single device or person ever holds a complete private key.
The team split the approach in two. One version protects everyday user accounts. A separate, stronger version secures high-value vaults, the kind institutions use to custody large holdings.
Here’s the detail that matters most for existing users: nobody has to move funds. People can upgrade to quantum-safe signatures with their current recovery phrase and keep their existing address. That single design choice removes the biggest obstacle blockchains usually face when overhauling core cryptography: forcing everyone to migrate assets to a new system. For a custody team managing client funds, that means no forced downtime and no costly re-issuance of wallets, just a signature swap.
What Happens Next
The team is running its technical tests on a dedicated NEAR testnet, not the public mainnet, so no customer funds are at risk yet. A governance review follows the testing phase. After that, the group plans to publish a white paper. It will also release its code as open source, so other chains and institutions can build on the work instead of starting over.
“No single bank, vendor, or regulator solves this alone,” said Chia Hock Lai, chairman of the Responsible Fintech Institute.
That’s the real improvement here. Quantum resistance stops being a theoretical roadmap item. It becomes something banks, regulators, and blockchain engineers actually test together, with working code and named institutions attached to it.
Read the original announcement from crypto.news.
This pilot follows a string of blockchain security fixes across the industry. Recent examples include the Besu patch that closed five Ethereum client flaws and Decred’s fix for a critical transaction-mixing flaw. Together, they show an industry treating security as an ongoing practice, not a one-time checkbox.
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- Besu Security Patch Closes Five Ethereum Client Flaws
- Decred Patches Critical Flaw That Could Have Unmasked Mixed Transactions
- BitBox Patches Two Severe Hardware Wallet Vulnerabilities