Ethereum Abandons Poseidon After Eight Years, Shifts to SHA and BLAKE

The Ethereum Foundation is shifting its focus towards SHA and BLAKE hashes for future layer-1 designs, abandoning Poseidon after eight years of work on specialized proof-friendly cryptography.

Ethereum researcher Justin Drake stated that recent advancements in binary-field proof systems have reversed the performance tradeoff that had favored Poseidon.

The new binary-field proof systems make SHA and BLAKE practical for use in Ethereum's design process, reducing the need for SNARK-friendly hashes.

According to Flock's benchmark, one M4 Max core can prove about 82,000 BLAKE3 compression evaluations per second, exceeding 660,000 BLAKE3 compressions per second with ten cores.

The decision concerns which hash foundations Ethereum may use in a future proof-driven L1, but Drake emphasized that no changes are necessary for existing rollups or zkVMs and there is no deployed fork.