Hassan Maishera
The Near Protocol announced via a blog post on Wednesday that it has launched Chain Signatures on NEAR. Chain Signatures enable NEAR accounts, including smart contracts, to sign transactions for any blockchain.
The team said this feature is powered by a decentralized MPC network which uses NEAR staking and Eigenlayer ETH restakers for security. Chain Signatures currently supports Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cosmos chains, DogeCoin, and XRP Ledger and will soon support Solana, TON Network, Polkadot, and others.
Explaining how it works, the team said Chain signatures introduce threshold signatures for any blockchain, controlled by NEAR accounts & smart contracts. A NEAR account, which can also be a smart contract thanks to the NEAR account model, can request that the NEAR validators or MPC nodes sign an arbitrary payload, which could be a transaction for some other blockchain, and get a signed payload back to then send to the destination chain.
NEAR Protocol is a decentralized application platform designed to make apps similarly usable to those on today’s web. The network runs on a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism called Nightshade, which aims to provide dynamic scalability and stabilize fees.NEAR is trading at $7.639, down by 1% in the last 24 hours.
