Vitalik Buterin Proposes Recursive STARK Mempools for Ethereum

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed a design for recursive STARK mempools, which could reduce the gas required for quantum-safe signatures and privacy protocols. The proposal, titled EIP-8288, is based on a concept called 'recursive STARKs' that allows nodes to aggregate proofs of dependencies before transactions are included in blocks.

Under this design, transactions would include 'dependency frames,' which contain statements that need to be proven, such as whether a message was signed by a particular public key or whether certain data satisfies a cryptographic condition. Instead of requiring every node to independently perform each underlying cryptographic computation, mempool nodes would aggregate the proofs, while the block would carry a recursive STARK proving the validity of the dependencies.

Buterin estimates that this system would require one STARK of roughly 100-300 kilobytes, along with about 96 bytes for each statement being proven. He believes that this could significantly reduce the amount of computation that Ethereum's execution layer needs to perform for complex cryptographic operations.