USDEthereum Drops Poseidon From Future Post-Quantum Design
Faster proof systems reopen the door to SHA and BLAKE
TL;DR
- Ethereum researcher Justin Drake said the Ethereum Foundation is moving away from Poseidon for future layer-1 designs after proof-system advances erased its earlier efficiency advantage.
- The change is not tied to a known break in Poseidon and does not require changes to existing rollups, zkVMs or user wallets.
- Ethereum’s post-quantum roadmap now points toward established hash functions, leanXMSS signatures and leanVM-based proof aggregation.
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The Ethereum Foundation is abandoning Poseidon for future Ethereum layer-1 designs and turning toward established hash families such as SHA or BLAKE, researcher Justin Drake said on Aug. 13, 2026, after advances in SNARK technology changed the performance tradeoff that had favored specialized proof-friendly hashes.
Drake said the shift does not reflect a cryptographic break in Poseidon and did not issue a migration order. Poseidon had been considered for future post-quantum systems including leanVM, but those systems have not been deployed on Ethereum mainnet. The decision instead concerns the cryptographic foundations Ethereum may use in a future proof-driven layer 1.
SNARKs are compact cryptographic proofs that confirm a computation was performed correctly without requiring every verifier to repeat the underlying work. Many SNARK systems operate over large prime fields, where the bitwise operations used by conventional hashes such as SHA-256 and Keccak historically imposed high proving costs. Poseidon was designed to reduce that burden by using arithmetic better suited to proof systems.
That engineering tradeoff has shifted as newer proof systems have become more efficient at processing conventional hashes. Drake said researchers have effectively moved from designing SNARK-friendly hashes toward building hash-friendly SNARKs, reducing the need for specialized primitives such as Poseidon.
Binary-field proofs change the performance equation
Newer binary-field proof systems work naturally with binary operations and therefore better match the bitwise structure of conventional hashes. Binius research is one example of that approach, while a Flock paper posted July 29, 2026 applied newer techniques to proving large batches of standard hash computations.
The Flock authors reported the following proof-of-concept benchmark results:
Those benchmark figures measure internal hash operations in a proof-of-concept system rather than Ethereum transaction throughput. The results nevertheless illustrate why standard hashes can now be considered for proof-heavy infrastructure without carrying the same proving penalty that originally favored Poseidon.
SHA-256 is part of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Secure Hash Standard. BLAKE2 has had a public informational specification since 2015, while the Flock implementation benchmarked the newer BLAKE3. Drake referred broadly to SHA or BLAKE as possible directions, without identifying a finalized replacement hash.
Eigen Labs founder and CEO Sreeram Kannan said established hash-based systems have fewer known avenues of attack than other post-quantum approaches and could be deployed faster because they have already undergone years of scrutiny. Kannan also said joint work involving the Ethereum Foundation, Eigen Labs and zero-knowledge proof company Succinct increased proving speeds by 2.5 times.
Ethereum’s security roadmap separately identifies protocol simplification as a way to reduce the network’s attack surface. Faster proof systems give Ethereum greater flexibility to rely on conventional hash primitives with longer histories of public analysis instead of choosing a younger specialized hash mainly for proving efficiency.
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leanVM and Ethereum’s post-quantum timeline
Ethereum’s broader post-quantum design contemplates replacing validator BLS signatures with hash-based leanXMSS signatures. leanVM would then be used to aggregate the much larger volume of signature data into compact proofs, allowing Ethereum to verify the underlying work without processing all of that cryptographic data directly.
Drake’s personal strawmap places production-grade leanVM around 2027 and deployments across Ethereum’s consensus, data and execution layers in 2028. Those dates are preliminary. Ethereum’s official post-quantum roadmap separately gives a nonbinding target of about 2029 for core infrastructure and extends full execution-layer migration beyond that point.
Ethereum’s quantum-resistance guidance currently tells users to leave their wallets unchanged. Drake’s announcement also calls for no changes to existing rollups or zkVMs and does not describe a deployed fork, meaning the Poseidon decision remains focused on future Ethereum architecture rather than a live-network migration.
The change follows roughly eight years of work around specialized proof-friendly cryptography. The shift does not mean Poseidon failed; rather, advances in proof systems have weakened the performance constraint Poseidon was designed to solve, allowing Ethereum researchers to reconsider which hash functions best fit the network’s future post-quantum stack.
FAQ
Why is Ethereum moving away from Poseidon?
New proof systems have reduced the performance advantage that previously made Poseidon attractive.
Was Poseidon found to be broken?
No. Drake reported no break in Poseidon.
Does the change affect existing rollups or zkVMs?
No changes to existing rollups or zkVMs were requested.
What is leanVM meant to do?
It would aggregate large volumes of cryptographic work into compact proofs for efficient verification.
This article has been refined and enhanced by ChatGPT.
