Advancing Chain Signatures: What’s Next?

Since the mainnet launch of Chain Signatures in August 2024, the engineering team at Near One has been working on improving the security and performance of Chain Signatures. In this post, we’ll share the upcoming milestones for Chain Signatures development, along with the timelines for exciting new features you can look forward to.

Current focus

Our top priority is enhancing the latency and throughput of Chain Signatures. We’re on track to launch a new version in February 2025 that will deliver an impressive 300x improvement in throughput. Alongside this, the new version will reduce the latency of on-chain signing by 50%, enabling users to experience faster transaction settlements than ever before.

Next Steps for H1 2025

In the first half of 2025, we are prioritizing several major improvements to enhance the capabilities and security of Chain Signatures:

• TEE Integration for the MPC Network TEE (trusted execution environments) is a powerful hardware-based primitive that enables verifiable computation and can be used to ensure that no key share from any of the node operators can ever be leaked. We want to make sure that every node that participates in signing runs their MPC code inside TEE. It is not just the signing code itself, but also the code that verifies the signing request, which involves a light client, and the code that authenticates a new node when they join the network. TEE integration will prevent long range attacks and further strengthen the security of Chain Signatures.
• EdDSA Support. While our initial focus has been on ECDSA (widely used for digital signatures in many blockchains), we’re expanding to support EdDSA, which is the key signature scheme for popular blockchains like Solana and TON. Adding EdDSA support will extend Chain Signatures to more blockchains, advancing the vision of a seamless, multichain future.
• Reading Data from Other Chains Chain Signatures allows users and smart contracts to sign transactions for other chains on NEAR. To make NEAR a hub for the multichain future, it is also important to enable reading other chain data, mostly account state, on NEAR, which can also be achieved securely through MPC.

Future work

We plan to work on novel cryptography research to further improve the efficiency and scalability of Chain Signatures. The goal is to scale the Chain Signatures MPC network to 30 nodes without compromising performance, with added benefits of stronger censorship resistance and decentralization. We also plan to research expanding Chain Signatures to include other signature schemes such as Secp256r1, used for passkeys on mobile phones.

Build with Chain Signatures

Join the growing community of teams building chain-agnostic applications powered by Chain Signatures, including the projects listed below. Chain Signatures enable truly autonomous AI agents, DeFi capabilities on Bitcoin and other non-smart contract chains, seamless cross-chain applications, and more.

Infinex: The crypto everything app

HOT: Seamless omnichain wallet

RuneShot: Runes launchpad with real price discovery

Satoshi Port: Prime brokerage for Bitcoin holders

Bitte: Omnichain wallets and AI agents

Templar: Borrow against any asset (BTC, XRP, TON, and more)

Solswap: Swap from SOL, TRUMP and more to BTC, XRP, ETH, DOGE

Satoshi Protocol: Trade for any asset from Bitcoin

Atlas: Non-custodial Bitcoin restaking

BitHive: Bitcoin restaking with flexible slashing conditions

OmniLane: Fastest decentralized omnichain exchange

To start working alongside these projects and build new multichain use cases, get started here: https://docs.near.org/build/chain-abstraction/chain-signatures/