NEAR Protocol · 2026-10-09 19:53 UTC

Quantum Security, Universal Markets, and Confidential AI: NEAR at TOKEN2049 Singapore At TOKEN2049 Singapore, NEAR was at the center of industry conversation, with new markets launching on near.com, Illia showcasing the convergence of NEAR Intents and NEAR AI on the main stage, and cryptographers, investors, and builders convening for a full day on quantum security co-hosted by NEAR and Quantus. Here are the highlights. ✦ Robinhood Chain went live on near.com and NEAR Intents ✦ Quantus Network’s post-quantum asset, QTC, debuted on near.com across 30+ chains ✦ NEAR and Quantus co-hosted Quantum + Privacy Day, broadcast live by The Rollup ✦ Industry turns to quantum security, with ML-DSA already live on NEAR mainnet ✦ Near One previews NEP-655 and a Q-Day Recovery Registry ✦ Illia made the case for AI and finance that are private by default ✦ Confidential Intents expanded to DarkSwap and Circuit ✦ New models on NEAR AI Cloud ✦ A House of Stake proposal to lower NEAR issuance ✦ New research from Bitwise, Grayscale, and Delphi Digital Robinhood Chain is live on near.com and NEAR Intents Swap ETH, USDG, and more against 180+ assets across 30+ chains. Deposit, withdraw, and pay to and from Robinhood Chain without manually navigating bridges or downloading a new app. Builders get the same access through NEAR Intents. Wallets and apps on the 1Click API can offer Robinhood Chain assets with confidential execution and limit orders. QTC debuts on near​.com, the first post-quantum asset accessible cross-chain from day one Quantus Network's QTC, a post-quantum asset, launched on near.com. Users can trade it confidentially across 30+ chains, with native deposits and withdrawals to and from the Quantus network. QTC is also available through the NEAR Intents 1Click Swap API. Any integrated wallet or app can offer QTC to its users without building Quantus-specific infrastructure. @TrustlessState also sat down with Quantus founder Christopher Smith and @AlexAuroraDev to discuss the significance of the launch in light of the industry’s latest turn to quantum security. NEAR and Quantus set industry agenda at Quantum + Privacy Day On October 8, NEAR and Quantus brought builders together to map what post-quantum security actually requires: which signatures hold, how migration works, where privacy breaks, and who stays exposed when the cryptography shifts. Speakers included Balaji Srinivasan, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox, Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley, Dragonfly Managing Partner Haseeb Qureshi, and Bankless co-founder David Hoffman, alongside Quantus co-founder Christopher Smith, NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin, and Alex Shevchenko, CEO of Defuse Labs, the developer of NEAR Intents. Illia explained how any NEAR account can become quantum-safe today by rotating its keys, with no need to move assets. The Rollup broadcast live all day. Quantum security becomes an industry priority Following Quantum + Privacy Day, quantum security became one of the most talked-about topics across the industry. On NEAR, upgrading signatures is already a routine operation. ✦ ML-DSA signing: NEAR accounts already support the post-quantum ML-DSA signature scheme on mainnet, with no asset migration required. ✦ NEP-655: committed implicit accounts derived from a hash of their initial state. Assets sit behind that hash, with no public key or key hash exposed onchain. Live on testnet, with mainnet planned in the coming weeks. ✦ NEAR Intents Wallet Contracts: being designed to support custom signing extensions, including ML-DSA and hash-based schemes. ✦ Q-Day Recovery Registry: a registry on NEAR for chains that can’t yet add a post-quantum key, where users commit recovery keys as rotatable hashes. In progress. NEAR was designed with quantum in mind in 2018. Read the full roadmap: Preparing NEAR for the Quantum Computing Era Illia on the main stage In his TOKEN2049 keynote, Illia made the case for AI and finance that are private by default, with near.ai and near.com working as one privacy stack. The full keynote recording is coming soon. He also joined Base's Jesse Pollak and Gauntlet CEO Tarun Chitra on a panel about blockchains, stablecoins, and AI agents that transact on their own. Confidential Intents expands to DarkSwap and Circuit Two more apps now offer confidential execution, powered by NEAR Intents: ✦ @DarkSwapApp is using Intents to give Solana users more ways to swap confidentially. ✦ @CircuitAI integrated Intents, enabling users to make confidential transfers across chains from a single natural-language prompt. New on NEAR AI ✦ New models on NEAR AI Cloud: GPT-6.1 Sol for coding and agent workflows, and TypeSafe’s Jev 1.13 for routing and classification are now on NEAR AI. See the full list of models supported by NEAR AI. ✦ Verify it yourself: How to Verify Private Inference, from NEAR AI Head of Product Sergey Astretsov, shows how to check NEAR AI’s confidentiality claims. A governance proposal to lower NEAR issuance A new House of Stake proposal from Sal Ternullo, CEO of SVRN, would lower NEAR’s maximum annual issuance from 2.5% to 1.6%. The cut would phase in on a linear ramp over 24 months, beginning after a one-quarter grace period. The proposal is a draft in community discussion. If it passes a supermajority vote in House of Stake, validators would still need to adopt it through the standard protocol upgrade process. Media, research, momentum ✦ Grayscale: their latest analysis highlights NEAR as a leading project in the AI crypto sector and as the "platform for agentic commerce." ✦ Bitwise: new report calls NEAR Protocol "a settlement engine fast and cheap enough for AI-scale commerce," citing $30B+ in cumulative NEAR Intents volume. ✦ Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan: why NEAR is “one of the most ambitious projects in crypto.” ✦ Bitwise NEAR ETF (NRR): top 10 by assets under management among the 107 US ETFs launched in September. ✦ Delphi Digital: NEAR Intents had its best fee month of the year in September, after confidential perps launched on near.com via Hyperliquid. ✦ The Rollup: Illia describes NEAR Intents as a "market of markets” and walks through how near.com and Intents now support tokenized stocks. ✦ NEAR Intents traction report: September was one of Intents’ biggest growth months yet, across volume, users, and new integrations. The week also included a NEAR Happy Hour on October 6 for builders, partners, investors, and community members. Thank you to everyone across the NEAR ecosystem who joined us in Singapore, and to everyone who followed along from home. The future is NEAR.

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