Ethereum Devs Propose Deposit Contract Overhaul to Quantum-Proof Staking
Ethereum developers proposed replacing the validator deposit contract to prepare staking for post-quantum cryptography. The current contract hardcodes BLS12-381 sizes, limiting public keys to 48 bytes and signature data to 96 bytes, which is too small for post-quantum schemes. The draft replacement allows up to 8,192 bytes for keys and credential metadata and requires each deposit to declare a credential scheme, with scheme 0 reserved for BLS and no post-quantum scheme defined yet. The new contract would pass deposit data to the consensus layer while leaving cryptographic details for a later EIP, and would require a coordinated fork across execution and consensus layers. It includes three states: disabled, BLS enabled, and BLS retired, with retirement permanently preventing BLS onboarding again. The proposal is still a draft with undecided deployment details. The underlying post-quantum choice remains unsettled, but hash-based signatures appear to be a leading candidate.
