Ethereum L1 Abandons Poseidon, Shifts to SHA2 or BLAKE2 to Advance Post-Quantum Cryptography Roadmap

Odaily Planet Daily News Justin Drake stated that Ethereum L1 will no longer adopt the SNARK-friendly hash function Poseidon, which has dominated since 2019, shifting toward traditional hash functions such as SHA2 or BLAKE2s. This adjustment is based on progress in the SNARK design space, with the focus shifting from "SNARK-friendly hashing" to "hash-friendly SNARKs." By natively aligning Boolean operations in traditional hashing with binary fields, the proving performance of traditional hashes in SNARKs has reached 1 million operations per second, with an overhead of approximately 100x. Research efforts such as Binius and Flock have driven related progress. The Ethereum Foundation's post-quantum team is advancing this roadmap, which includes deploying a production-grade leanVM in 2027 and deploying across the consensus layer, execution layer, and data processing layer in 2028. Justin Drake also noted that AI's enhanced capabilities in cryptanalysis have recently dealt successive blows to the lattice-based scheme HAWK and the isogeny-based scheme SQIsign, with hash-based schemes being used for blockchain post-quantum signatures. The trend of open-source automated research is also accelerating, with SNARK.fast achieving 1.8 million BLAKE3 proofs per second.