Banks Test Post-Quantum Crypto Transfers on a NEAR Testnet
A group of banks and financial regulators began testing crypto transfers built to outlast quantum computers on Monday. The Responsible Fintech Institute, an industry body, said it had launched the pilot with two banks moving test funds on a private version of the NEAR blockchain. Three regulators are watching as observers, among them a MENA authority. No customer money is involved, and nothing runs on a public network. The aim is narrow: see whether wallets and transfers signed with post-quantum cryptography hold up in a bank setting.
What the pilot runs on
Bison Bank and DK Bank are the two lenders creating wallets and sending on-chain transfers, RFI said. The regulators sitting in as observers are the Abu Dhabi Global Market, or ADGM, Malta's Financial Services Authority and Bhutan's Gelephu Financial Services Office. Safeheron, a custody-infrastructure firm, supplies the cryptography. The banks start by generating wallets and then move test transfers between them, so the exercise walks through the full path a real transaction would take. All of it runs on a specialised NEAR testnet rather than the live chain, and RFI was explicit that no customer funds change hands. That keeps the exercise inside a sandbox.
The cryptography in plain terms
The signatures use ML-DSA-65, one of the algorithms in the US standards body NIST's FIPS 204 — the post-quantum signature standard finalised in August 2024. Post-quantum means built to withstand a future quantum computer able to break the elliptic-curve maths that secures most wallets today. RFI paired that with a non-custodial 2-of-2 design, where two parties each hold half of a private key and both must sign before a transfer goes through. The split leans on multiparty computation, a method for holding a secret so no single party ever sees the whole key. None of this is new maths. Putting it under a bank's transfer flow, with regulators in the room, is the part being tested.
What can and cannot be checked yet
RFI chairman Chia Hock Lai framed the pilot as a shared effort, not any one firm's project.
"No single bank, vendor, or regulator solves this alone," he said, describing the work as building "a shared security and compliance reference."
There is a hard limit on what outsiders can say about it. The protocol's code and a promised white paper are not out, so no independent researcher can yet test the security claims. RFI says the paper is coming, with an open-source release to follow, and gives no dates for either. The group has also flagged a governance review that looks at operational resilience and how such a system would work across borders. Until then the findings stay inside the consortium.
Why the region is watching
For readers in the Gulf, the detail that travels is ADGM's seat at the table, one of three regulators lending the test scrutiny it would not carry on its own. Quantum machines able to break today's wallet keys do not exist yet, and may not for years. A pilot like this one is a bet that the switch has to be designed long before the threat lands. Whether a 2-of-2 post-quantum wallet survives a real bank's compliance rules is the question the coming white paper is meant to answer.