Illia Polosukhin: NEAR built for quantum since 2018, post-quantum keys live on mainnet

NEAR Intents as a market of markets

Illia Polosukhin describes NEAR Intents as a broad vision for a "universal aggregator of anyone wanting to trade anything anywhere," finding the best counterparty to execute a request. He says the system has expanded beyond crypto to include traditional venues: "So now you're aggregating actually not just crypto venues, you actually now have NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchange and we're going to be adding more venues as well." He gives the example of a user wanting an asset like "sovereign," where solvers could buy it on Nasdaq, tokenize it, and deliver it to the user's wallet without needing immediate onchain liquidity.

Polosukhin says this model lets demand itself attract liquidity over time, as solvers with different strategies come online to serve assets like Quantis that lack immediate venues. He frames the end state as natural-language intents that could extend to physical projects, calling it a system that aggregates "trading but also just like generally willing reality into uh into real like willing things into reality." He also credits NEAR's choice to abandon "this zero sum game of layer ones" in favor of cooperation as key to building this liquidity layer and attracting partners.

Why NEAR says it's already quantum-ready

Polosukhin says NEAR's account model was built with future cryptographic shifts in mind, allowing key rotation and multiple keys without moving assets. He notes the practical simplicity of this design:

"it takes effectively like 200 lines of code to add a new cryptographic curve" — Illia Polosukhin

He says NEAR shipped its first post-quantum implementation, the ML-DSA ("lithium") curve, to mainnet around July, following newly standardized post-quantum algorithms and growing concern after new attacks on recovering private keys from public keys.

He contrasts this with the broader market reaction to quantum fears, where he says "everything is red today based on this perceived threat," while NEAR has diverged. He argues that holding assets through a NEAR account already updated to post-quantum cryptography protects exposure to assets held on other chains like Ethereum and Bitcoin, saying NEAR's infrastructure teams "are going to take care of this." A host pushes back, asking whether users would still be exposed if Ethereum itself were compromised, a point left without a direct resolution beyond Polosukhin's assurance that NEAR's teams, including cryptography, smart contract and "Shield" proactive analysis systems, would respond.