NEAR’s 2.13 mainnet update adds NIST-approved ML-DSA account-key support and dynamic resharding, allowing automatic shard splits in roughly 1.5 epochs as demand grows.
NEAR Protocol said it launched network upgrade 2.13 on mainnet on July 20, 2026, adding quantum-safe signing through the NIST-approved FIPS-204 ML-DSA scheme and introducing dynamic resharding. The protocol said the release makes NEAR one of the first layer-1 blockchains with a NIST-approved post-quantum signing scheme live in production, while automating shard expansion so the network can scale as usage grows. NEAR said developers can already rotate account keys to ML-DSA through the NEAR CLI, and that the changes support services including NEAR Intents and near.com. Separately, NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin said AI is rapidly increasing hackers’ ability to find software vulnerabilities, citing the October Balancer incident as an early sign of AI-assisted hacking and arguing that AI should be used to speed formal verification.