Chain Signatures are a very powerful innovation that make @NEARProtocol much more than a blockchain. They underpin systems like NEAR Intents and help turn NEAR into an abstraction layer for executing transactions across many different blockchains. Rather than managing multiple wallets or addresses, Chain Signatures enable users to interact with different chains from one NEAR account. It’s an integrated approach that combines the strengths of different ecosystems: users can leverage NEAR’s sharded and scalable infrastructure while maintaining control over external accounts and assets and accessing different sources of liquidity. Chain Signatures ultimately unlock true ownership of cross-chain data and assets through one protocol, NEAR. It’s a complex workflow under the hood—with Derivation Paths, a Multichain Smart Contract, and the Multi-Party Computation (MPC) service—but it’s completely on-chain and a user only needs to call a smart contract. MPC ensures secure transaction signing and mitigates the risk of centralized custodianship during multi-chain operations. Our near-term goal is to enforce Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) on node operators through verification on the smart contract and increase the MPC network to about 20 node operators with major infrastructure providers. We’re also working on improving the scalability of the cryptography that powers chain signatures. Breakthroughs on that front will enable NEAR block producers to become MPC node operators At that point, MPC can just become part of the NEAR protocol, and NEAR will effectively become the core infrastructure securing value across the multi-chain ecosystem.