Ethereum Hash Upgrade Ditches Poseidon for Quantum-Resistant SHA and BLAKE
Ethereum just made one of its most consequential cryptographic decisions in years, and it happened almost quietly on social media. Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake announced that the network is walking away from Poseidon, the hash function built specifically for zero-knowledge proofs, in favor of a more conventional Ethereum hash upgrade built around SHA or BLAKE. It’s a shift with implications far beyond a technical footnote, arriving alongside a cluster of other ecosystem moves — from Robinhood Chain‘s NFT surge to ENS DAO’s new governance body — that together paint a picture of a crypto industry rapidly rewiring its infrastructure.
Key takeaways
- The Ethereum Foundation is abandoning Poseidon for Ethereum L1 and pivoting to SHA or BLAKE, targeting a production-grade leanVM in 2027 and layer deployments in 2028.
- Robinhood Chain became the largest network by daily NFT trading volume at $3.13 million, even as its total value locked jumped 32% weekly to $473 million while active accounts grew just 3.3%.
- Hyperliquid will auto-deploy idle USDC into its native lending pool for yield, while Uniswap is redirecting test-token creator fees into an auto-buy-and-burn ETH contract.
- ENS DAO approved the creation of the ENS Foundation as a formal operating body, and Solana-based Jupiter launched Lend v2 with roughly $1.9 billion in deposits.
- A security study found 15 x402 payment providers, including Coinbase, each violated at least one security rule, while MegaETH’s USDm stablecoin supply collapsed more than 95% from its peak.
Ethereum Foundation Shifts Hash Function Strategy for Layer 1
The core answer to why this matters is simple: Ethereum’s move away from Poseidon signals that its long-term security architecture is being rebuilt around cryptography that has already survived decades of outside scrutiny. Drake described the decision as the end of an “8-year, 8-figure rabbit hole” in post-quantum research, and it changes how Ethereum plans to defend itself against future quantum computers.
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