Ethereum abandons its 8-year cryptography bet after proof systems flip the tradeoff

Ethereum researcher Justin Drake said on Aug. 13 that the Ethereum Foundation is abandoning Poseidon for future layer-1 (L1) designs and pivoting toward SHA or BLAKE hashes after eight years of work on specialized, proof-friendly cryptography.Drake reported no break in Poseidon and issued no migration order, noting that recent gains in proof systems changed the performance tradeoff that had favored the hash.SNARKs produce compact proofs that a computation was performed correctly. Many use arithmetic over large prime fields, where the bitwise operations behind conventional hashes such as SHA-256 and Keccak historically imposed a high proving cost. Poseidon was designed to lower that cost by fitting the proof system's preferred math.Binary-field proofs raise hash throughputBinius research binary-field construction works naturally with 0s and 1s, closely matching Keccak's bitwise operations. The Flock paper, posted July 29, applies newer techniques to large batches of standard hash computations.Flock's authors report that one M4 Max core can prove about 82,000 BLAKE3 compression evaluations, 42,000 SHA-256 compressions, and 30,000 Keccak permutations per second. Ten cores exceeded 660...