NEAR Protocol activated v2.13 on mainnet June 24, delivering dynamic resharding and quantum-resistant transaction signing in a single release.
Dynamic resharding. Until v2.13, expanding NEAR's shard count required weeks of manual validator coordination and a governance vote. The new system monitors each shard's state size and splits it at epoch boundaries without human coordination, per Crypto Briefing. The NEAR team projects that scaling to 70 or more shards would push throughput past Visa's commonly cited peak of roughly 24,000 transactions per second, a forward projection rather than the network's current state. On mainnet at activation, NearBlocks showed 6 TPS, on a chain that has processed 5.38 billion total transactions.
Post-quantum signing. V2.13 adds the FIPS 204 ML-DSA-65 scheme, a lattice-based algorithm NIST finalized in 2024, as a third signing option alongside ed25519 and secp256k1. Existing accounts can rotate to the new scheme in a single transaction without address migration. Crypto Times reported NEAR chose the NIST-standardized ML-DSA standard to avoid migration overhead. Quantum computers capable of breaking current elliptic-curve cryptography do not yet exist, and timelines in the field remain contested.
A third component, the NEAR Intents framework for AI agent cross-chain routing, shipped alongside as supporting infrastructure; it is not the headline change.
NEAR's token had already priced in much of the news before June 24. Decrypt reported a 28% single-day surge on May 22, 2026, when the upgrade cluster was first announced publicly. At activation, NEAR was trading at $1.98, per NearBlocks.
