Ethereum Makes Major Cryptography Pivot to Prepare for Quantum Era

The Ethereum Foundation is abandoning the Poseidon hash function on its base layer, moving to options like SHA or BLAKE, according to researcher Justin Drake.

The shift reshapes the network's long-term plan to resist future quantum computers. Drake announced the decision on August 13, calling it the conclusion of an eight-year research effort.

Ethereum Ditches Poseidon in Post-Quantum Security Shift

The Ethereum Foundation has been funding "SNARK-friendly hashes" since 2018. Poseidon arrived in 2019, becoming the dominant SNARK-friendly hash.

However, Drake said that "breakthrough SNARK designs" have challenged the assumption that specialized SNARK-friendly hash functions, such as Poseidon, are necessary.

"Off-the-shelf traditional hash functions like SHA2 and BLAKE2s can now match Poseidon in a SNARK. In hindsight the key was not SNARK-friendly hashes, but hash-friendly SNARKs," he said.

The shift comes from proof systems built over binary fields, which work directly with the bit-level operations behind traditional hashes. Earlier systems relied on large prime numbers, making those operations expensive to represent.

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