The Quantum Threat to Blockchains | NEAR Co-founder Illia Polosukhin
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About this video
NEAR Co-founder Illia Polosukhin explains what the quantum threat actually is, why it's a problem for the whole industry rather than any single chain, and NEAR’s recent mainnet upgrade to quantum-safe accounts, using ML-DSA-65 (FIPS-204), the NIST-approved post-quantum signature scheme. Illia also explains how NEAR’s account model is uniquely designed to enable a simple key rotation to post-quantum signing, rather than a full migration.
Read how NEAR is preparing for the quantum computing era: https://www.near.org/blog/making-near...
#NEAR #nearprotocol #NEARAI
Transcript
479 wordsCaptions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.
- 0:07
Quantum computing is coming for blockchains. The ability to effectively recover from public keys, a private key uh is a unique capability that quantum computers can enable. Now, it's really hard to predict on the timeline, right?
- 0:27
We've for past 10 years always been saying it's five years away. At the same time, we see that AI is accelerating science across the board. We've seen AI experiments that are actually enabling to find a faster algorithms that need to use less uh cubits to uh recover private keys. And so we don't really know in the timeline. But importantly, when we think about blockchains, we think about trust.
- 0:54
We think about ability to keep your funds, your store value safe. And we want to enable as much time as possible for people to transition as much time as possible for custodians and wallets for tools and developers for agents for all them to transition to new cryptography that is postquantum secure. That's why we've launched uh on July 20th the ability to have postquantum keys uh
- 1:23
enabled on near accounts and near's design is uniquely enabling this functionality. We've designed it to really easily slot in new cryptography and uh this is kind of materialization of the design and importantly you don't actually need to move your assets. You can just change the keys on the spot for the same account. So really kind of well thoughtout design for account model is paying off now uh with this upgrade.
- 1:54
Unique about near that we can easily add this cryptography is the account model. It was designed to be extremely flexible and importantly decoupled from individual cryptographic keys. So traditionally when you think of Bitcoin and EDUM and other blockchains, they have a direct mapping between your private key to an account, right? You have a private key that gives you a public key and that usually is in some way your address. Now that is extremely
- 2:24
limited uh including just for security reasons, right? That means you need to keep sending around your private key or your seat phrase between different devices and between different uh people to enable access to the same account.
- 2:38
And so the difference in design for near is to make sure that you don't really have this mapping. Instead, you have the account as an object like you own the account and then you can have as many keys and different cryptography as you want. And so for example, we already supported two different cryptographic curves and with this addition, we now support postquantum cryptography as well. And so this means you can have
- 3:05
effectively different keys uh and with different permissions accessing this account and you can delete, add new keys and effectively rotate them all in spot without needing to move all your assets or do any kind of other invasive action.