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Goodbye, Poseidon!

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 era of hash-based cryptography.

Since 2018, the Ethereum Foundation has invested in magic cryptographic bricks, so-called "SNARK-friendly hashes". In 2019, Poseidon was born. It held strong and became the dominant SNARK-friendly hash, securing billions via zkrollups and zkVMs.

In a stunning reversal, breakthrough SNARK designs show that SNARK-friendly hashes aren't necessary after all. Off-the-shelf traditional hash functions like SHA2 and BLAKE2s can now match Poseidon in a SNARK. In hindsight the key was not SNARK-friendly hashes, but hash-friendly SNARKs.

The secret is doing maths over the smallest prime number: 2. So-called "binary fields" natively speak the language of bits, aligning with the boolean operations inside traditional hashes. This is a stark departure from "prime fields", where awkward large-prime arithmetic makes bit manipulation painfully expensive.

We're talking sci-fi cryptography. 1M traditional hash calls proven per second, on a laptop. Just 100x overhead vs native CPU boolean compute. Nobody predicted such performance, not even the handful of binary-field visionaries. Hat tip to the research geniuses:

Jim and Ben with Binius in 2023;

See Succinct Arguments over Towers of Binary Fields

Ron, Benedikt and William with Flock in June.

See Flock: Fast Proving for Batch Boolean Computations

With SHA2, the lean aesthetic of minimal assumptions reaches its climax. The EF's principled stance on pure hash-based cryptography has aged like fine wine. We now enjoy foundations the world can trust for decades and centuries, foundations worthy of the dream of an internet of value.

Speed of deployment is a secondary win. There's no longer a need to wait years for Poseidon cryptanalysis to bake. Emile and Thomas from the EF post-quantum team are moving at breakneck speed with binary fields. The strawmap now points to a production-grade leanVM in 2027, with CL, DL, EL deployments in 2028.

As AI becomes exceptional at cryptanalysis, the contrarian bet to avoid riskier structures like lattices and isogenies is visibly paying off. The past weeks have been brutal. Lattice-based "HAWK" and isogeny-based "SQIsign", both signature schemes in NIST's Round 3, have suffered blows. Sources I trust say more blood is coming.

On AI, the open autoresearch trend kicked off by ECDSA.fail is spreading fast, with amazing outcomes from zk.golf and SNARK.fast. Days ago SNARK.fast crossed 1.8M BLAKE3/sec proven on an M3 Max. Stay tuned for fresh autoresearch challenges dropping tomorrow.

Also tomorrow: Ethproofs call #10, dedicated to binary fields. Possibly the most noteworthy Ethproofs call yet. Experts leading the charge will present the future of hash-based SNARKs at 2pm UTC. What an incredible time to be alive. To witness history, DM me for a calendar invite :)

Today I can confidently claim that hash-based cryptography has won out for blockchain post-quantum signatures. SNARK succinctness compresses arbitrarily many signatures into one small proof per block. SNARK flexibility yields k-of-n threshold signatures, complex multisigs, and more.

Ultimate security. Uncompromising performance. Full programmability.

Believe in something. Believe in hashes.

Credits to Justin Drake

Yesterday, Ethereum had another bug in one of the consensus clients, called Nimbus, which made them lose sync to the head of the chain. Consensus breaking bugs occur quite often. The last big one was a Prysm bug 2 months ago. Nimbus recent incident meant, that everyone using Nimbus could not attest anymore and the node runners lost some income. But for the network it wasn't really a big issue. Thanks to client diversity, the network did not really struggle in any meaningful way. What is more interesting though is that such an incident can give us insights in how many people use a certain client. Before the incident, attestation participation was at around 99.8% after the incident, the attestation participation dropped to 94.5% within 4 epochs (~25 minutes). Or in other words, it looks like that around 5% of all validators are exclusively using nimbus as the consensus client. This fits very well with the numbers on clientdiversity.org, which has nimbus usage at 4.58%. It is great to see that these estimations on clientdiversity.org are pretty accurate as they are used in discussions about client diversity.

The source of the Nimbus bug are still unknown, but I am sure we will hear about it in the coming days. Fixing the issue is also quite simple, just restart your client. The aftermath of the incident was pretty harmless. Within 3 hours participation was back over 99% and after 9 hours after the incident, participation was still slowly increasing as more and more node operators restarted their clients.

Credits to u/haurog for the write up

One metaphor for Ethereum is BitTorrent, and how that p2p network combines decentralization and mass scale. Ethereum's goal is to do the same thing but with consensus.

Another metaphor for Ethereum is Linux.

• Linux is free and open source software, and does not compromise on this
• Linux is quietly depended on by billions of people and enterprises worldwide. Governments regularly use it.
• There are many operating systems based on Linux that pursue mass adoption
• There are Linux distributions (eg. Arch) that are highly purist, minimalistic and technologically beautiful, and focus on making the user feel powerful, not comfortable

(Actually, BitTorrent is depended on by enterprises too: many businesses and even governments (!!) use it to distribute large files to their users https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-legal-uses-for-bittorrent-youd-be-surprised )

We must make sure that Ethereum L1 works as the financial (and ultimately identity, social, governance...) home for individuals and organizations who want the higher level of autonomy, and give them access to the full power of the network without dependence on intermediaries. At the same time, what Linux shows is that this is fully compatible with providing value to very large numbers of people, and even being loved and trusted by enterprises worldwide. Many enterprises in fact desperately want to build on an open and resilient ecosystem - what we call trustlessness, they call prudent counterparty risk minimization.

This is the gwei.

Source and credits to OP: https://firefly.social/post/lens/381w29wcnv2ps0s8r7x

There have recently been some discussions on the ongoing role of L2s in the Ethereum ecosystem, especially in the face of two facts:

• L2s' progress to stage 2 (and, secondarily, on interop) has been far slower and more difficult than originally expected
• L1 itself is scaling, fees are very low, and gaslimits are projected to increase greatly in 2026

Both of these facts, for their own separate reasons, mean that the original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense, and we need a new path.

First, let us recap the original vision. Ethereum needs to scale. The definition of "Ethereum scaling" is the existence of large quantities of block space that is backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum - that is, block space where, if you do things (including with ETH) inside that block space, your activities are guaranteed to be valid, uncensored, unreverted, untouched, as long as Ethereum itself functions. If you create a 10000 TPS EVM where its connection to L1 is mediated by a multisig bridge, then you are not scaling Ethereum.

This vision no longer makes sense. L1 does not need L2s to be "branded shards", because L1 is itself scaling. And L2s are not able or willing to satisfy the properties that a true "branded shard" would require. I've even seen at least one explicitly saying that they may never want to go beyond stage 1, not just for technical reasons around ZK-EVM safety, but also because their customers' regulatory needs require them to have ultimate control. This may be doing the right thing for your customers. But it should be obvious that if you are doing this, then you are not "scaling Ethereum" in the sense meant by the rollup-centric roadmap. But that's fine! it's fine because Ethereum itself is now scaling directly on L1, with large planned increases to its gas limit this year and the years ahead.

We should stop thinking about L2s as literally being "branded shards" of Ethereum, with the social status and responsibilities that this entails. Instead, we can think of L2s as being a full spectrum, which includes both chains backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum with various unique properties (eg. not just EVM), as well as a whole array of options at different levels of connection to Ethereum, that each person (or bot) is free to care about or not care about depending on their needs.

What would I do today if I were an L2?

• Identify a value add other than "scaling". Examples: (i) non-EVM specialized features/VMs around privacy, (ii) efficiency specialized around a particular application, (iii) truly extreme levels of scaling that even a greatly expanded L1 will not do, (iv) a totally different design for non-financial applications, eg. social, identity, AI, (v) ultra-low-latency and other sequencing properties, (vi) maybe built-in oracles or decentralized dispute resolution or other "non-computationally-verifiable" features
• Be stage 1 at the minimum (otherwise you really are just a separate L1 with a bridge, and you should just call yourself that) if you're doing things with ETH or other ethereum-issued assets
• Support maximum interoperability with Ethereum, though this will differ for each one (eg. what if you're not EVM, or even not financial?)

From Ethereum's side, over the past few months I've become more convinced of the value of the native rollup precompile, particuarly once we have enshrined ZK-EVM proofs that we need anyway to scale L1. This is a precompile that verifies a ZK-EVM proof, and it's "part of Ethereum", so (i) it auto-upgrades along with Ethereum, and (ii) if the precompile has a bug, Ethereum will hard-fork to fix the bug.

The native rollup precompile would make full, security-council-free, EVM verification accessible. We should spend much more time working out how to design it in such a way that if your L2 is "EVM plus other stuff", then the native rollup precompile would verify the EVM, and you only have to bring your own prover for the "other stuff" (eg. Stylus). This might involve a canonical way of exposing a lookup table between contract call inputs and outputs, and letting you provide your own values to the lookup table (that you would prove separately).

This would make it easy to have safe, strong, trustless interoperability with Ethereum. It also enables synchronous composability (see: https://ethresear.ch/t/combining-preconfirmations-with-based-rollups-for-synchronous-composability/23863 and https://ethresear.ch/t/synchronous-composability-between-rollups-via-realtime-proving/23998 ). And from there, it's each L2's choice exactly what they want to build. Don't just "extend L1", figure out something new to add.

This of course means that some will add things that are trust-dependent, or backdoored, or otherwise insecure; this is unavoidable in a permissionless ecosystem where developers have freedom. Our job should make to make it clear to users what guarantees they have, and to build up the strongest Ethereum that we can.

Source and credits to OP: https://firefly.social/post/lens/2qyrfkkt3q3693rc3qn

Some people were worried about quantum computers, so here in this video is a little bit on how we'll be dealing with it

🔐 Post-Quantum Ethereum is coming, and here's how it works.

We just delivered a self-study sharing session of leanMultisig - the breakthrough tech that will protect Ethereum's consensus layer in the quantum era.

Learn how leanMultisig will quantum-proof Ethereum, enabling post-quantum signature aggregation, the core mechanism enabling thousands of validators to vote together, through proving and verifying signatures with purpose-built zkVMs! 🤯

The Quantum Challenge:

Why Ethereum needs post-quantum signatures  
How leanSig replaces BLS signatures  
The role of zkVMs in aggregation  

Technical Deep-Dives:

Lean ISA's minimalist design (only 4 instructions!)  
Execution traces → polynomial transformations  
Proof generation and verification with WHIR  
Reducing 1000 signatures (3MB) to just 380KB  

Perfect for ZK enthusiasts and anyone curious about Ethereum's post-quantum future. A great starting point to explore the concepts before diving deeper into the official specs.

Source: https://xcancel.com/ReamLabs/status/2016202675105460568
YT link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A812DZvOLI

The whole piece is quite funny as well, check it out: https://adelaidemail.com/single-post/2024/01/16/cyclists-take-up-so-much-room-says-man-from-4-metre-wide-emotional-support-vehicle/

The New York Stock Exchange is building a venue using blockchain technology to allow for trading tokenized stocks and exchange-traded funds around the clock.

NYSE, which is owned by Intercontinental Exchange Inc., plans to use its existing technology that matches buyers and sellers, combined with private blockchain networks, to facilitate the trading of tokenized securities in real-time, according to executives. The company is looking to launch the new digital trading platform later this year, pending regulatory approval.

“This reflects an evolution of NYSE’s trading capabilities which went from trading floor, to electronic order-book, to blockchain,” Michael Blaugrund, vice president of strategic initiatives at ICE, said in an interview. “It allows for new types of investor accessibility, and will create new opportunities for retail to participate in the stablecoin-funded markets that have attracted their attention.”

The firm is in active dialogue with the US Securities and Exchange Commission as it seeks permission to operate the new platform, he said. Part of the digital infrastructure would allow for trades to be funded, and settled in real time, as opposed to the one-day delay that now exists in today’s equity markets.

“We think it aligns with the retail investor’s emerging desire to be able to trade something at 5:04 p.m. on a Saturday and then use that money to buy something else at 5:05 p.m. on a Saturday,” Blaugrund said. “This would facilitate that trade in a way that traditional equity infrastructure cannot.”

NYSE’s plans are addressing some of the foundational elements of how stocks are defined, issued and settled — questions that could decide whether tokenization becomes embedded in the plumbing of Wall Street. The New York Stock Exchange is the largest equities exchange operator in the US by volume.

A tokenized security is a digital representation of a security that can be traded on a blockchain network, rather than in a brokerage account. They have been touted as a way to deepen liquidity, support fractional ownership and widen access of the US stock markets because they can be traded at all hours of the day.

Blaugrund said the new venue is just one of several digital strategies that ICE is exploring. The company is also looking at new clearing infrastructure that would support trading 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. ICE is working with banks to support tokenized deposits, eventually looking to move money and manage funding requirements for trading outside of traditional banking hours.

“This is just the first step in a broader re-platforming, in a longer journey for ICE and for the industry,” Blaugrund said.

Round-the-Clock Access
NYSE’s main competitor in the US, Nasdaq, asked regulators in September to let investors trade tokenized versions of stocks on its public exchange. The company proposed that tokenized securities should trade under the same rules of execution and documentation as the underlying security, and that tokenized assets should be clearly labeled as such.

Supporters of tokenization say the move could be a step toward round-the-clock access to certain assets. NSYE already outlined its path to extend trading hours on its Arca equities venue, with plans to offer trading 22 hours on weekdays. That separate proposal got initial approval from the SEC in February, pending updates to the market’s data feed which is a necessary step for exchanges to offer extended trading hours.

NYSE’s new digital venue could be another push toward non-stop trading, and help bridge the gap between traditional markets and digital finance. Skeptics counter that the digital technology may be new, but the underlying risks in lending and borrowing remain unchanged — and that winning over regulators and major investors will be essential before such trades become routine.