Banks and financial regulators from Europe, the Middle East and Asia joined a cross-regional pilot testing post-quantum security for digital asset wallets and blockchain transfers on Aug. 24, in one of the first coordinated efforts to prepare financial institutions for quantum computing threats.
Who Is Participating
The Responsible Fintech Institute convened the project with digital asset custody infrastructure provider Safeheron as its technology partner. Bison Bank and DK Bank will test wallet creation and onchain transfers in a shared application environment. Abu Dhabi Global Market, Bhutan's Gelephu Financial Services Office and the Malta Financial Services Authority will initially participate as observers.
The pilot does not mean that quantum computers can presently compromise the participating banks or the NEAR network. It is a preparedness exercise intended to test how financial institutions could adopt new signature standards before sufficiently powerful quantum computers become available.
ML-DSA-65 Signatures on NEAR Testnet
Safeheron developed a multiparty computation protocol supporting ML-DSA-65, one of the parameter sets contained in the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology's FIPS 204 standard. NIST finalized the standard in August 2024, saying ML-DSA is believed to remain secure against an adversary possessing a large-scale quantum computer.
Multiparty computation allows several parties or devices to participate in signing a transaction without reconstructing a complete private key in one location. The pilot combines that custody model with post-quantum signatures intended to resist future attacks. Testing will cover wallet generation and transfers on a quantum-resistant NEAR testnet.
Regulators Examine Governance
Regulators will observe the technical work during the first phase rather than execute transfers themselves. Their participation levels will vary depending on each institution's mandate and jurisdiction. A later governance workstream will examine operational resilience, oversight and cross-border interoperability.
No single bank, vendor, or regulator solves this alone, said Responsible Fintech Institute Chairman Chia Hock Lai, describing the project as an effort to produce a shared security and compliance reference. Safeheron said it eventually intends to release the protocol as open source software, allowing independent researchers to examine the implementation.
Why Quantum Preparedness Matters
The Bank for International Settlements warned in a July 2025 roadmap that migration to post-quantum systems cannot be treated as a simple algorithm replacement. Banks must identify where existing cryptography is used, assess third-party dependencies and prepare systems that can switch between cryptographic methods.
Hong Kong's banking sector scored 2.3 out of 10 for quantum preparedness, while 32% of surveyed banks had not begun preparing. The Algorand Foundation has set a 2027 target for broad quantum resilience, and Bitcoin developers have proposed new transaction formats designed to protect future funds from quantum attacks. However, moving existing holdings into quantum-resistant outputs would require broad coordination across users, wallets, exchanges and custodians.
