The Ethereum Foundation made a major shift: after conducting research for up to eight years and burning tens of millions of dollars to study the Poseidon hash, it has officially abandoned SNARK-friendly Poseidon on L1 and reverted to traditional hash functions such as SHA2 or BLAKE2.
Researcher Justin Drake said the key breakthrough came from a “binary field” SNARK design, which allows traditional hashes to run in circuits with performance close to Poseidon. On a typical laptop, roughly 1 million SNARK verifications of traditional hashes can be completed per second.
On the roadmap, the production-grade leanVM is expected to be released in 2027. Plans to deploy related components across the consensus, data, and execution layers are scheduled to be completed in 2028. The Foundation’s post-quantum team is also accelerating research into the binary field.
Going from “built for SNARKs” back to “classic cryptographic primitives” may look like a retreat, but it is really a matter of engineering trade-offs and maturation. $ETH
Researcher Justin Drake said the key breakthrough came from a “binary field” SNARK design, which allows traditional hashes to run in circuits with performance close to Poseidon. On a typical laptop, roughly 1 million SNARK verifications of traditional hashes can be completed per second.
On the roadmap, the production-grade leanVM is expected to be released in 2027. Plans to deploy related components across the consensus, data, and execution layers are scheduled to be completed in 2028. The Foundation’s post-quantum team is also accelerating research into the binary field.
Going from “built for SNARKs” back to “classic cryptographic primitives” may look like a retreat, but it is really a matter of engineering trade-offs and maturation. $ETH