Ethereum Shifts From Poseidon Hashes as Binary-Field SNARKs Advance

• Vitalik Buterin praised Poseidon’s role in privacy proofs as Ethereum explores faster general-purpose STARK systems.
• Binary-field SNARKs can make SHA2 and BLAKE2s practical inside proofs, reducing Poseidon’s earlier advantage.
• Ethereum targets a production-grade leanVM in 2027, with broader consensus and execution deployments potentially following in 2028.

Ethereum’s cryptography plans are shifting as new proof systems make traditional hashes more practical for Ethereum’s L1. Vitalik Buterin praised Poseidon’s past value, while Bitcoin security researcher Justin Drake said the Ethereum Foundation is moving toward SHA or BLAKE. Drake linked the change to faster binary-field SNARKs and post-quantum research.

Buterin said years of work went into Poseidon hashes. He said Poseidon enabled fast client-side SNARK generation for privacy protocols.

However, Buterin highlighted progress in general-purpose STARKs. He said current systems prove broadly batched computations with mid-three-digit overhead. He added that this could soon reach double-digit levels or lower.

Drake described Poseidon’s development as an eight-year effort backed by eight-figure funding. He said the Ethereum Foundation began researching SNARK-friendly hashes in 2018. Poseidon emerged in 2019 and later supported zkrollups and zkVMs.

Drake said newer SNARK designs can use traditional hashes without SNARK-friendly functions. He named SHA2 and BLAKE2s as examples that can now match Poseidon inside a SNARK. According to Drake, binary fields use the prime number 2 and fit traditional hash operations.

He contrasted them with large prime fields, where bit manipulation requires more work. Drake said researchers can prove 1 million hash calls per second on a laptop. He estimated about 100 times the overhead of native CPU Boolean computation.

Drake credited Jim and Ben with Binius in 2023, plus Ron, Benedikt and William with Flock in June. He said Emile and Thomas are developing binary-field systems. The roadmap targets a production-grade leanVM in 2027.

Consensus, data availability and execution-layer deployments could follow in 2028, Drake said. He also cited setbacks involving lattice-based HAWK and isogeny-based SQIsign. He said both appeared in NIST’s Round 3 signature schemes.

Drake cited SNARK.fast exceeding 1.8 million BLAKE3 proofs per second on an M3 Max. He referenced ECDSA.fail, zk.golf and autoresearch efforts. Ethproofs call No. 10 will focus on binary fields at 2 p.m. UTC.

Drake said hash-based cryptography had won for blockchain post-quantum signatures. SNARKs can compress signatures into one block proof. He cited k-of-n thresholds and complex multisigs.