Buterin Seeks to Cut Quantum-Safe Privacy Costs on Ethereum

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin wants to make quantum-safe private transactions more affordable on the network. He's pushing for EIP-8288, a proposal he co-authored with Thomas Coratger in June, which could cut costs by over 99%. The plan would move heavy cryptography out of the execution path and reduce the cost of verification from 150,000 to 200,000 gas to just a few thousand.

The current quantum-safe signatures are large, running at 2 or 3 kilobytes, while STARK proofs are even worse, at over 128 kilobytes. Buterin says that under EIP-8288, both would land in the low tens of thousands. He believes this is necessary for Ethereum's future and has proposed it as part of the I-star upgrade after Hegota.

Buterin also floated the idea of adopting RISC-V as Ethereum's canonical instruction set, which he called a 'big decision' that should be taken carefully but is necessary. This would make it easier to express statements in a common language for recursive proofs. He envisions private account abstraction, where an account's logic can be hidden on-chain and ownership changed without revealing the specific positions.