NEAR Protocol expanded its Chain Signatures infrastructure on April 30, 2025 to cover five additional blockchain networks (Solana, TON, Stellar, Sui, and Aptos) by adding support for a second cryptographic signature standard. The upgrade means a single NEAR account can now authorize transactions directly on ten separate blockchains, without the use of bridges, wrapped tokens, or secondary wallets.

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What Changed and Why It Matters

When NEAR's Chain Signatures launched on mainnet in August 2024, it could only sign transactions using ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm), the cryptographic standard shared by Ethereum, Bitcoin, Cosmos, Polygon, and BNB Chain. The five networks added in April 2025 use a different standard: EdDSA (Edwards-curve Digital Signature Algorithm), specifically the Ed25519 curve variant. Without native EdDSA support, those networks were simply out of reach.

The technical distinction matters beyond nomenclature. EdDSA is generally faster to compute, more resistant to side-channel attacks (including timing-based exploits), and supports batch signature verification, a feature relevant to high-throughput chains like Solana. Adding it effectively doubles the cryptographic coverage of NEAR's cross-chain layer.

Chain Signatures works through a decentralized Multi-Party Computation (MPC) network, where independent node operators each hold a shard of a signing key. No single operator ever holds a complete private key; a valid signature requires coordinated consensus across the network. That MPC network is secured jointly through NEAR staking and ETH restakers via EigenLayer. The full EdDSA rollout was tied to Nearcore v2.6.0, with Protocol Upgrade 77 going live on May 8, 2025, as scheduled. (Human review recommended: confirm the upgrade executed as planned on that date before final publication.)

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The TON Angle: Telegram's Billion-User Reach

Of the five newly supported networks, TON carries the most immediate implications for developers building in emerging markets. TON is the native blockchain of Telegram, which reported over 950 million monthly active users in January 2025, more than 100 million wallet signups through its embedded wallet product, and approximately 35 million active Telegram wallets as of Q2 2025, a figure that distinguishes genuine engagement from signup counts alone. In Nigeria alone, the TON-integrated wallet app TonKeeper has 1.3 million active users, 900,000 of whom onboarded in May 2024.

NEAR accounts can now sign and execute TON transactions directly, which opens up workflows between NEAR's application layer and Telegram's user base without requiring developers to maintain separate TON wallets or key infrastructure.

India's exposure to the TON ecosystem is also substantial: the country generates an estimated 84 million new Telegram downloads per month, making it one of the platform's largest growth markets and a significant potential audience for TON-based applications built on top of Chain Signatures.

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Solana's On-the-Ground Presence in Nigeria and India

Solana's inclusion is equally significant for developers operating in West Africa and South Asia. Superteam Nigeria, Solana's local developer community, ranks among the top six Superteam chapters globally by earnings, surpassing $1 million in total earnings as of August 2025. Its March 2025 startup event drew 832 registrations.

Superteam India is also active within the Solana ecosystem, though comparable earnings or ranking data was not available at time of publication.

Projects built through those communities tend to be payments-adjacent and mobile-first: cross-border remittance tools and WhatsApp-based on/off ramps are among the documented examples, including Ribh Finance and Azza respectively.

NEAR's ability to natively sign Solana transactions gives builders in Lagos or Bengaluru a new backend option: one that lets them use Chain Signatures as a multichain orchestration layer without asking users to migrate away from Solana.

South Asia's broader crypto activity provides further context: transaction volumes across the region grew roughly 80% in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period a year earlier, reaching an estimated $300 billion. India ranks first globally in crypto adoption by Chainalysis metrics (per Chainalysis's 2025 adoption index), Pakistan third, Bangladesh fourteenth.

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NEAR's Network in Context

NEAR reported approximately 46 million monthly active users in Q2 2025, with daily active users around 3 million, a figure the protocol claims is the highest among Layer 1 blockchains, though that ranking had not been independently corroborated by a third-party source such as Messari or Dune Analytics at the time of publication and should be treated with corresponding caution. Daily transaction counts run between 6 and 7 million. Block time sits at 600 milliseconds following the Nightshade 2.0 upgrade, with finality around 1.2 seconds.

NEAR's token has not reflected that activity in price terms. At the time of the April announcement, NEAR traded around $2.54 with a market cap near $3 billion. As of late February 2026, the token sits at approximately $1.09, placing it around rank 55 by market cap with a valuation near $1.4 billion. Separately, Bitwise Asset Management filed for a NEAR-focused ETF in Delaware, a nascent institutional signal, though the filing's approval status as of publication was not confirmed.

Several projects were already live on Chain Signatures at the time of the EdDSA announcement, most notably SWEAT, the move-to-earn app with significant adoption across South and Southeast Asia (the strongest regional connection for readers in those markets). Additional early adopters include Atlas Protocol, Omnilane, Satoshi Ramp, HERE Wallet, NEAR Intents, and Runemine.

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What Comes Next

NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin has consistently positioned chain abstraction (the idea that users should not need to know or care which blockchain their application runs on) as the protocol's core thesis. "Chain abstraction is key to mainstream adoption of crypto," he has said in interviews with The Block on the subject. That quote comes from a broader discussion of NEAR's direction rather than a statement specifically about the EdDSA upgrade, but the expansion is a concrete step in that direction. Execution now depends, in the author's assessment, on whether developers across the ten supported networks find the tooling practical enough to build with.

The MPC network's node operator count stood at ten at the August 2024 mainnet launch; the current count as of the April 2025 announcement was not confirmed by available sources and should be verified against NEAR documentation before publication. Broader decentralization of that infrastructure, and the depth of developer uptake on the EdDSA chains, will determine whether Chain Signatures becomes foundational plumbing or a feature that plateaus at current adoption levels.