Overview
- The Responsible Fintech Institute and Safeheron convened a cross-regional pilot that began on Monday, August 24, 2026, to run wallet creation and on-chain transfer tests on NEAR’s quantum-resistant testnet.
- The pilot uses a non-custodial 2-of-2 multi-party computation design so two separate parties each hold a key share and must cooperate to sign transactions without any party holding a full private key.
- Testing implements the NIST FIPS 204 ML-DSA-65 lattice-based signature standard inside the MPC flow to evaluate real-world performance, latency and interoperability in institutional workflows.
- Participating banks include Bison Bank and DK Bank while Abu Dhabi Global Market, Bhutan’s Gelephu Financial Services Office and the Malta Financial Services Authority are observing technical runs and will join a later governance workstream.
- Safeheron is leading protocol engineering and has pledged to open-source the PQC code while RFI will publish a whitepaper documenting findings to support independent security review and guide coordinated industry migration.