Ethereum Foundation Drops Poseidon for Simpler, Quantum-Resistant Design

The Ethereum Foundation is moving away from Poseidon as a planned hash function for a future Ethereum base-layer design, Ethereum Foundation core researcher Justin Drake said Aug. 13, 2026.

Drake said advances in proof systems operating over binary fields have changed the trade-off between conventional hashes and specialized SNARK-friendly hashes such as Poseidon.

Poseidon is a hash function designed specifically to be efficient inside SNARK proofs, and it became Ethereum's dominant SNARK-friendly hash after its 2019 release.

According to Drake, newer binary-field proof systems can handle the operations used by conventional hashes more efficiently. 

He credited Binius research by Benjamin Diamond and Jim Posen, along with newer work called Flock, with helping change the trade-off.

Drake said these systems can prove roughly 1 million conventional hash computations per second on a laptop, about 100 times slower than native CPU computation.

That performance could make established hashes such as SHA-2 and BLAKE more practical for Ethereum's future base-layer design, reducing the need for a specialized SNARK-friendly hash.

Drake also linked the proposed direction to Ethereum's broader post-quantum strategy.

He argued that Ethereum should favor established cryptographic assumptions and be cautious about newer cryptographic constructions. Drake cited setbacks involving HAWK, a lattice-based signature scheme, and SQIsign, an isogeny-based signature scheme, as examples of the risks associated with newer cryptographic approaches.

The broader strategy includes preparing Ethereum's cryptographic infrastructure for the possibility of future quantum computers.

The proposed change does not make Poseidon obsolete for existing applications and does not require developers to migrate immediately.

Instead, it concerns Ethereum's future base-layer architecture.

Drake said a production-grade leanVM is targeted for 2027, with consensus, data and execution-layer deployments targeted for 2028.

The proposed shift would allow Ethereum to rely more heavily on established hash functions while taking advantage of advances in zero-knowledge proof systems. It represents a change in the cryptographic direction being considered for Ethereum's future base layer, rather than an immediate network-wide migration.

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