NEAR 2.14.0 ends the developer gas rebate and adds on-chain ML-DSA signature checks
Victoria Shinder1 min readnearcore 2.14.0, published on 26 October and marked for mainnet, is a protocol and database upgrade for NEAR validators. Its release notes list several protocol changes.
The most visible for developers removes gas rewards: executing a FunctionCall no longer pays part of the burned gas back to the contract account. The burnt_gas_reward parameter falls from 30% to 0%, following governance proposal HSP-027. A new ml_dsa_verify host function lets contracts verify FIPS 204 ML-DSA-65 post-quantum signatures on chain: it takes a 3,309-byte signature, a message of any length and a 1,952-byte public key, returns 1 or 0, aborts on wrongly sized inputs and costs a 540 Ggas base plus 11 Mgas per byte. Messages are verified as-is with an empty context string, so callers must not pre-hash them.
The per-receipt storage proof limit of 4 MB now applies to every action in a receipt, not only function calls, with a new ReceiptStorageProofSizeExceeded error. The DelegateV2 meta-transaction action introduced in 2.13.0 is removed; new transactions carrying it are rejected, so gas keys can no longer sign meta transactions at all, while receipts created before the upgrade still execute. Finally, a chunk producer that has missed at least 100 chunks on a shard and fallen below an 80% produced-to-expected ratio stops receiving new chunks there within the epoch, after a 1,000-block grace window, with a safeguard so a shard never runs out of producers.
What it means
Ending the gas rebate changes the economics for contracts that earned income from usage, and teams relying on it should recheck their numbers. The ML-DSA host function is the forward-looking piece: post-quantum signature checks priced as a native operation rather than emulated in contract code. Clients that decode error enums need updating for two new variants.