Ethereum Foundation drops Poseidon, citing advances in compact proofs
Researcher Justin Drake says the Ethereum Foundation is moving away from its Poseidon hash in favour of SHA and BLAKE alternatives, arguing recent gains in proof size have erased Poseidon's edge.
The Ethereum Foundation is stepping away from Poseidon, the hash function it had positioned at the centre of a coming wave of zero-knowledge upgrades. Researcher Justin Drake confirmed the shift on 13 August 2026, telling Cointelegraph that recent advances in compact proofs had stripped Poseidon of the performance advantage that had made it the Foundation's preferred candidate for post-quantum security work on Ethereum. He called the change a milestone for post-quantum security on the network.
The move is technical in its language and strategic in its consequences. Monexus analysis: the framing inside the Foundation's own statement is one of cryptographic conservatism, not efficiency maximisation. Poseidon, an arithmetic-friendly hash, was attractive precisely because it sat comfortably inside the algebraic structures that SNARK provers already operate over. As long as proving a Poseidon preimage cost less than proving a SHA-256 preimage, the choice was obvious for any protocol that wanted quantum-resistant signatures or commitments without paying a punishing fee in proof size. The trade-off, in plain terms, was supposed to be a more compact proof at the cost of trusting a newer primitive. The Foundation has now decided, per Drake, that the size gap has closed.
What actually changed
Poseidon's edge, in the Foundation's framing as reported by Cointelegraph, was arithmetic. SNARKs work over finite fields, and Poseidon is a hash designed to behave well inside one. SHA-256 and BLAKE were designed for general-purpose CPUs and tend to produce awkward constraints when forced into a SNARK's algebraic world. For years that asymmetry gave Poseidon advocates a clean quantitative pitch: cheaper proofs, smaller on-chain footprints, cheaper verification. Drake's argument, as reported, is that newer proving systems and accumulated engineering work have flattened that gap. The Foundation is now willing to accept the cost of squeezing SHA or BLAKE into a SNARK in exchange for primitives with decades of public cryptanalysis behind them.
That choice also reads as a hedge. The post-quantum conversation inside Ethereum has long split between two camps: those willing to trust a newer arithmetic-friendly primitive to keep proofs cheap, and those who prefer the boring safety of well-studied hashes even if proofs bloat. Drake's announcement sits squarely in the second camp and signals that the Foundation's stated risk appetite has shifted toward cryptographic conservatism at exactly the moment when quantum timelines have moved from speculative to operational.
The counter-read
Monexus assessment: the honest counter-read is that this is not really a cryptographic decision in isolation; it is a posture decision. The Foundation has chosen the path that aligns more comfortably with the audit and regulatory ecosystem now crystallising around digital assets in the United States. A hash function with a long public track record is easier to defend in front of an examiner than one whose security arguments lean heavily on recent academic literature. That makes the choice defensible on institutional grounds even before the proof-size math is settled.
There is also a quieter counter-read about engineering sunk cost. Independent research teams and tooling vendors across the broader zero-knowledge ecosystem have invested substantial work into Poseidon variants and Poseidon-friendly circuits. The available source items do not specify which teams or how much capital is exposed, and this article has not independently established the scope of that exposure. The pivot does not invalidate that work, but it does reduce the institutional tailwind behind it. Anyone who has bet a roadmap on Poseidon-friendly tooling now has to decide whether to follow the Foundation's lead or hold the line.
The wider institutional picture
The Poseidon pivot lands inside a broader hardening of the US institutional plumbing around digital assets. Separately, on 12 August 2026, Cointelegraph reported that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency was pushing to revive new bank chartering, backing entities in digital assets and other new technologies, while commending the FDIC's own reform efforts. Monexus analysis: the two developments are not causally linked, and the source items do not specify any direct coordination, but they sit inside the same macro picture. The institutional perimeter around digital assets is tightening, and the protocols that want to feed into that perimeter are adjusting their defaults toward what regulators and auditors already recognise.
Read as a single technical decision, the Poseidon exit is modest. Read as a pattern, it is more interesting. The Foundation is choosing, per its own framing, primitives that the broader cryptographic community has stress-tested for decades over marginal efficiency gains from newer constructions. Whether that posture will frustrate researchers who came to Ethereum precisely because it was willing to take engineering risks is an open question the source items do not resolve.
What to watch next
Two near-term questions follow from Drake's announcement. First, which SHA or BLAKE variant the Foundation settles on, and with what parameter set: the SNARK-friendliness of different members of those families is not uniform, and the choice will determine how much of Poseidon's lost efficiency actually comes back. Second, what happens to the Poseidon-adjacent tooling already shipped or in development across the broader Ethereum ecosystem. Lighter clients, rollup teams, and a handful of L2s have built around Poseidon-friendly circuits; whether they migrate, fork, or absorb the extra cost will be the first real test of how binding the Foundation's research signals still are.
The available source items do not specify a published specification or EIP number accompanying the pivot, nor do they confirm which specific BLAKE or SHA construction is being evaluated. The Foundation has framed the move as a milestone; the engineering bill arrives next.
How Monexus framed this vs the wire: Cointelegraph reported the announcement as a research update; this piece reads the same announcement as an institutional posture shift, and treats the cryptographic trade-off as a posture decision aligned with a hardening regulatory perimeter rather than a pure efficiency call.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereum-foundation-drops-poseidon-post-quantum-plan
- https://t.me/Cointelegraph/71605
- https://t.me/cointelegraph/71605
- https://t.me/Cointelegraph/71571
- https://t.me/cointelegraph/71571