Overview
- Justin Drake announced on Aug. 13, 2026 that the Ethereum Foundation will pivot its Layer 1 roadmap away from the Poseidon hash and toward established hashes such as SHA and BLAKE.
- Researchers say advances in binary-field and hash-friendly SNARK designs from projects like Binius, Flock and SNARK.fast now let traditional hashes be proved at roughly one million operations per second in research settings, with SNARK.fast reporting up to 1.8 million BLAKE3 compressions per second.
- The Foundation will continue a Poseidon cryptanalysis program offering up to $1 million in bounties through December 2026, and the roadmap decision does not force existing rollups, VMs, or projects that already use Poseidon to switch immediately.
- Post-quantum work will emphasize hash-based signatures and proof aggregation, with a production-grade leanVM targeted for 2027 and broader layer deployments planned for 2028, subject to further testing and coordination.
- The shift lowers reliance on a newer algebraic primitive by favoring widely vetted hashes that are already supported in tooling and hardware, while wallet operators, exchanges and protocol teams will still face engineering and testing work to adopt post-quantum and aggregation changes.