Ethereum abandons its 8-year cryptography bet after proof systems flip the tradeoff
Ethereum researcher Justin Drake said the Ethereum Foundation is shifting future L1 design away from Poseidon and toward conventional hashes like SHA or BLAKE. No break in Poseidon was reported, and no migration was ordered; the change reflects new proof-system performance gains that weaken Poseidon’s original advantage. SNARKs need compact proofs, and hash design has long been shaped by proving cost. Recent work such as Binius and Flock suggests standard hashes are becoming much cheaper to prove. Flock reports high proving throughput for BLAKE3, SHA-256, and Keccak, with SHA-256 proving over nine times faster than a Binius64 comparison in its benchmark. This reverses the old logic: instead of building SNARK-friendly hashes, researchers are building hash-friendly SNARKs. That lets Ethereum consider conventional, well-studied hashes without a major proving penalty, which also supports roadmap ideas like leanXMSS signatures and leanVM aggregation. No immediate changes are planned for wallets, rollups, or zkVMs.
