Justin Drake: The EF Is Moving Away From Poseidon for Ethereum L1
Justin Drake says off-the-shelf hashes can now match Poseidon inside zk-proofs.
Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake said the EF is ditching Poseidon, the specialized hash function that's long secured L1-bound zk-proofs, in favor of standard hashes like SHA-2 or BLAKE.
Goodbye, Poseidon!
— Justin Drake (@drakefjustin) August 13, 2026
An epic 8-year, 8-figure rabbit hole in post-quantum cryptography reaches its dream conclusion. The Ethereum Foundation is abandoning Poseidon for L1, pivoting to SHA or BLAKE. This milestone unlocks ultimate security for lean Ethereum and foreshadows a golden…
What's the Scoop?
- The caveat: No formal EF blog post or EIP has followed yet, so for now this is Drake's own framing of an internal research shift rather than a finalized protocol update.
- The technical flip: New binary-field SNARK designs, building on 2023's Binius and 2026's Flock, let standard hashes match Poseidon's in-proof performance, what Drake calls "hash-friendly SNARKs" rather than "SNARK-friendly hashes." The claimed throughput potential is about 1 million hash calls proven per second on a laptop.
- Why it matters: Poseidon has secured billions in zkrollup and zkVM value since 2019, but its novel design meant years of cryptanalysis before L1-scale trust. Standard hashes carry no such wait.
- The roadmap: This feeds Drake's "lean Ethereum" vision, with a strawmap timeline a production leanVM will arrive in 2027 and consensus, data, and execution layer deployments in 2028.
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