Ethereum Foundation Drops Poseidon, Chooses SHA and BLAKE
The Ethereum Foundation will drop the Poseidon hash and adopt established hashes such as SHA or BLAKE for its post-quantum architecture, researcher Justin Drake announced.
The Ethereum Foundation plans to replace the Poseidon hash function with established hashes such as SHA and BLAKE for parts of its post-quantum architecture, researcher Justin Drake announced. The change affects proposed systems like leanVM, which aim to help Ethereum verify large volumes of blockchain activity more efficiently.
Drake cited improvements in SNARK proving speeds as the main technical reason for the change. SNARKs are compact cryptographic proofs that let validators confirm the result of a computation without re-running the work. Faster SNARKs reduce the performance advantage that Poseidon offered inside proof circuits.
Drake outlined a tentative timeline for the work. “A production-ready leanVM is targeted for 2027,” he wrote, and follow-on deployments across Ethereum’s consensus, data and execution layers are expected in 2028. He emphasized the dates are preliminary and that no changes have been deployed to mainnet.
Poseidon was previously considered because it was designed to be efficient inside zero-knowledge proof circuits. Developers had viewed it as a candidate for future components that need to operate inside SNARKs. With proving speeds improving, the foundation concluded conventional hashes can meet performance needs while relying on well-studied algorithms.
Sreeram Kannan, founder and CEO of Eigen Labs, supported the decision and noted that established hash families have undergone years of analysis. Kannan said work carried out with the Ethereum Foundation and the zero-knowledge company Succinct has increased proving speeds by about 2.5 times, a gain that improves how routine hashes perform inside proof systems.
The foundation’s materials make clear research and prototype work will continue before any mainnet upgrades. The broader ecosystem will need to plan how and when to adopt changes, and developers and researchers are expected to keep testing alternatives as part of Ethereum’s longer-term effort to improve quantum resistance across its stack.
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