BlockBeats report, on August 26, Ethereum developers proposed a new EIP draft to restructure the existing validator deposit contract, paving the way for the Ethereum staking system's migration to post-quantum cryptography.
This proposal plans to replace the fixed BLS key structure in existing contracts with support for variable-length keys and credential data, with a single-item limit of up to 8,192 bytes, and requires the use of a specified "credential scheme" for each deposit claim. Currently, only scheme 0—corresponding to the existing BLS signature system—is defined; future EIPs may further define post-quantum validator key standards.
The new contract will introduce three states: "Disabled," "BLS Enabled," and "BLS Permanently Retired." Once the system call enters the BLS retired state, the use of the existing BLS scheme to add new validator stakes will be permanently prohibited and cannot be re-enabled.
This proposal is still in draft form and awaits review by the EIP editors. The contract address, deployment code, and activation time have not yet been determined, and final implementation requires coordinated upgrades from both the Ethereum consensus and execution layers.
One of the proposal’s authors, Thomas Coratger, noted that post-quantum cryptography is not a simple software upgrade. Current Ethereum research is heavily focused on hash-based signature schemes, whose stateless versions have signature sizes of approximately 8 KB, closely matching the new contract’s 8192-byte limit.
The Ethereum Foundation has previously established a post-quantum security team. Related research shows that over 65% of ETH is currently held in addresses whose public keys have been exposed on-chain, and the potential threat quantum computing poses to the existing elliptic curve signature system is increasingly becoming a long-term security concern for Ethereum.