Headline: Ethereum devs draft overhaul of deposit contract to make staking “quantum-ready” Ethereum developers have put forward a draft proposal to rebuild the deposit contract every validator touches when entering staking — the first concrete infrastructure move aimed at preparing the network’s $100B+ staking layer for post-quantum cryptography. What’s changing - The current deposit contract is hardcoded for BLS12-381 sizes (48-byte public keys, 96-byte signature metadata), leaving no room for the much larger post-quantum public keys and signatures. - The proposed replacement lets deposits include keys and credential metadata up to 8,192 bytes each, and requires each deposit to declare which “credential scheme” it uses. Scheme 0 will represent BLS; no other scheme definitions are included in this draft. - The contract supports three modes: disabled, BLS enabled, and BLS retired. If a system call retires BLS, authors say it cannot be re-enabled later. - The proposal carries the larger deposit data through to the consensus layer but deliberately defers specifying the post-quantum cryptography itself to a future EIP. - Implementing the change will require a coordinated fork across both the execution and consensus layers. Status and authorship - The change is submitted as a draft pull request to the EIP repository and awaits EIP editor review. Deployment address, activation timestamps and other activation details are undecided. - One of the three authors, Thomas Coratger, publicly highlighted in a Twitter thread how unsettled the underlying post-quantum cryptography choices remain, summarizing a talk by Stanford cryptographer Dan Boneh about the practical challenges. Why this matters - Many promising post-quantum signature schemes are far larger than current elliptic-curve signatures. Stateless hash-based schemes that NIST-standardized candidates point toward tend to require on the order of ~8 KB per signature — roughly the new contract’s ceiling — while smaller “compact” PQ schemes often introduce operational pitfalls (e.g., counters that, if misused, can leak private keys). - The Ethereum Foundation assembled a team last year to plan a post-quantum transition. A May report from quantum-security firm Project Eleven estimated better-than-even odds of a machine capable of breaking elliptic-curve signatures by 2033 (with 2030 possible). The report also noted more than 65% of ETH sits in addresses whose public keys are already revealed onchain — increasing potential exposure. Bottom line This proposal is a pragmatic, low-level infrastructure step: it doesn’t pick a post-quantum algorithm, but it unblocks the protocol by widening fields and adding a credential-scheme mechanism so a future EIP can plug in post-quantum key formats. If adopted, it will make the staking entry path ready to accept the much larger keys PQ crypto demands — but it will require coordinated action across Ethereum’s layers and more cryptographic decisions to come. Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news