NEAR Puts Quantum Security, Universal Markets, and Confidential AI at the Center of TOKEN2049 Singapore

Robinhood Chain and Quantus Network's post-quantum asset, QTC, go live on near.com and NEAR Intents as NEAR co-hosts Quantum & Privacy Day with Quantus

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 13, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- NEAR, the open infrastructure powering the agent economy, closed out TOKEN2049 Singapore with a focus on privacy for AI and finance, quantum security, and infrastructure for AI agents, alongside a run of launches and integrations. During the week, Robinhood Chain and Quantus Network's post-quantum asset QTC went live on near.com and NEAR Intents, and NEAR co-hosted Quantum & Privacy Day with Quantus.

On the TOKEN2049 main stage, co-founder Illia Polosukhin delivered a keynote making the case for AI and finance that are confidential by default, and joined Base's Jesse Pollak and Gauntlet CEO Tarun Chitra on a panel about the role of blockchains and stablecoins as AI agents begin to transact on their own. In an interview with The Rollup during the week, Illia described NEAR Intents as a market of markets and laid out the vision for near.com, including how tokenized asset markets will move onchain.

Robinhood Chain is now live on near.com. Users can swap popular Robinhood assets against 180+ assets across 30+ chains, and deposit, withdraw, and pay to and from Robinhood Chain without manually navigating bridges or downloading a new app. Robinhood Chain is also available through NEAR Intents, so wallets and apps integrated with NEAR Intents can offer the same access to their users.

Quantus Network's QTC, a post-quantum asset, also launched on near.com and through the NEAR Intents 1Click Swap API, with confidential trading across 30+ chains and native deposits and withdrawals to and from the Quantus network.

On October 8, NEAR and Quantus co-hosted Quantum & Privacy Day. Builders from across the industry gathered to map what post-quantum security actually requires: which signatures hold, how migration works, where privacy breaks, and who stays exposed when the cryptography shifts. Speakers included Balaji Srinivasan, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox, Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley, Dragonfly Managing Partner Haseeb Qureshi, and Bankless co-founder David Hoffman, alongside Quantus co-founder Christopher Smith, NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin, and Alex Shevchenko, CEO of Defuse Labs, the developer of NEAR Intents. The Rollup covered the day live.

The event reflected an industry-wide conversation about preparing blockchains for quantum computing. NEAR was designed with quantum computing in mind since 2018, and NEAR accounts already support the post-quantum ML-DSA signature scheme on mainnet, with no asset migration required.

The week's launches follow new third-party analysis of NEAR's momentum. Bitwise's NEAR in Plain English report described NEAR Protocol as "a settlement engine fast and cheap enough for AI-scale commerce" and cited more than $30 billion in cumulative NEAR Intents volume. Delphi Digital reported that NEAR Intents had its best fee month of the year in September, after NEAR made Hyperliquid perps confidential by default. Grayscale described NEAR as a "platform for agentic commerce," and the Bitwise NEAR ETF (NRR) ranks in the top 10 by assets under management among the 107 US ETFs launched in September.

NEAR also hosted a Happy Hour on October 6 for builders, investors, and partners from across its ecosystem.

Following TOKEN2049, NEAR continues its work across private AI and finance and quantum-safe infrastructure through the final quarter of 2026. Read NEAR's full TOKEN2049 Singapore recap.

About NEAR:

NEAR is the open infrastructure powering the agent economy. NEAR's vertically integrated stack connects NEAR Intents for universal liquidity, NEAR AI for confidential and verifiable AI, and sharded blockchain infrastructure for 1M+ TPS scalability. near.com is NEAR's unified front-end: one account, 30+ chains, and confidential cross-chain swaps, perps, RWAs, and earn. With $30B+ in cross-chain volume and AI integrations with Abound, Brave Nightly, the Government of Bermuda, OpenMind, Venice AI, and more, NEAR is where agents transact. Learn more at https://www.near.org/.