ICP canister signs first NEAR transaction in cross-chain test

A community developer has demonstrated how an Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) canister can control a NEAR account and sign transactions, with the first transfer successfully recorded on the NEAR testnet.

The project uses a Rust-based canister capable of deriving an Ed25519 public key, constructing a NEAR transaction and producing a signature. The transaction was then submitted to the NEAR testnet, demonstrating a working connection between the two blockchain networks.

The approach draws on ICP’s chain-key cryptography, which allows canisters to request signatures without holding a complete private key in one place. Under the network’s threshold-signing system, participating subnet nodes collectively generate signatures without reconstructing the full private key.

There is, however, an important distinction between the current demonstration and a production deployment. The developer, posting on the Internet Computer developer forum on 6 November, said the test transaction was signed using a local development environment and the test_key_1 key. Deployment on ICP mainnet is the next step, where the production threshold-signing infrastructure can be used.

The developer also explained that the canister derives the NEAR account from its public key and encodes transactions using NEAR’s Borsh format. The implementation includes checks against transaction data generated by NEAR’s own JavaScript library to help ensure the encoded transaction is correct before signing.

The source code is expected to be made public, allowing other developers to examine the implementation and explore possible applications.

The demonstration adds to ongoing community efforts to connect ICP with other blockchain networks through its chain-key technology. ICP documentation lists Ed25519 threshold signing among the supported methods for interacting with networks including NEAR, Solana, TON, Polkadot, Cardano and Stellar.

While the testnet transfer establishes that the transaction-signing process works in a development setup, a mainnet deployment will be needed to demonstrate the production signing arrangement in operation.