Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake said the network's layer-1 roadmap will drop the Poseidon hash function in favor of established options such as SHA-2 and BLAKE2s. The shift follows advances in binary-field SNARK design that let standard hashes match Poseidon's performance inside zero-knowledge proofs, and it feeds into Ethereum's wider push toward post-quantum security.
Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, said in an Aug. 13 X post that the foundation is abandoning Poseidon for its layer-1 roadmap and pivoting to traditional hash functions such as SHA-2 or BLAKE2s. Poseidon emerged in 2019 as a hash function built for zero-knowledge proof systems, and its structure made it cheaper to process inside SNARKs than conventional, binary-operation hash functions.
Binary-field SNARKs close the gap
New binary-field SNARK designs, including projects called Binius and Flock, now let standard hashes match Poseidon's in-proof performance. Drake said the resulting systems can prove about 1 million traditional hash calls per second on a laptop, with roughly 100 times the overhead of native CPU execution. Separately, the SNARK.fast project reached 1.8 million BLAKE3 compressions per second, a 255% improvement over its starting benchmark, using AI-assisted proving code.
According to Drake: "In hindsight the key was not SNARK-friendly hashes, but hash-friendly SNARKs." Rollups, virtual machines, and other projects already using Poseidon face no requirement to replace it, since the decision covers only Ethereum's future layer-1 design.
Roadmap ties into post-quantum push
Drake linked the change to Ethereum's post-quantum security work, which prepares the protocol for computers capable of breaking elliptic-curve cryptography. Hash-based signatures sit at the center of that plan, since SNARK aggregation can compress many such signatures into one compact proof. The Ethereum Foundation's post-quantum team is targeting a production-grade leanVM in 2027, with deployments across the consensus, data, and execution layers to follow in 2028.
No formal EF blog post or EIP has followed the announcement, so the shift remains Drake's own framing of an internal research direction rather than a finalized protocol update.
Sources: crypto.news, Bankless
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