Ethereum L1 abandons Poseidon's hashing algorithm and shifts to the quantum cryptography route after SHA2 or BLAKE2

In comparison, Justin Drake, a core researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, announced in an article on the X platform that Ethereum L1 will no longer use Poseidon, the SNARK-friendly hash function that has dominated since 2019, and switch to traditional hash functions such as SHA2 or BLAKE2s. The adjustments are based on developments in the SNARK design field, and the focus is shifting from “SNARK-friendly hashing” to “hash-friendly SNARK.” By natively aligning boolean operations in traditional hashes in the binary domain, the proven performance of traditional hashes in SNARK has reached 1 million times per second, and the cost is about 100 times higher. Research such as Binius and Flock has fueled related developments.

The Ethereum Foundation's post-quantum team is advancing this route, and the roadmap includes deploying production-grade LeanVM in 2027 and deployment at the consensus layer, execution layer, and data processing layer in 2028. Justin Drake also said that the enhanced ability of AI in cryptographic analysis has caused HAWK and the homologous solution SQISign to be hit one after another recently, and the hash-based scheme is being used for post-blockchain quantum signatures. The trend of open source automated research is also accelerating, and SNARK.fast has achieved 1.8 million BLAKE3 proofs per second.