Vitalik Buterin proposes Ethereum upgrade to cut quantum-safe privacy costs

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is pushing for the inclusion of EIP-8288, a proposal designed to significantly reduce the cost of quantum-safe private transactions on the network. The plan, co-authored by Buterin and Thomas Coratger in June, aims to move the most computationally intensive cryptography out of Ethereum's execution layer and into a single, recursive STARK proof per block. Currently, post-quantum signatures can be 2 to 3 kilobytes and cost 150,000 to 200,000 gas to verify, while STARK proofs can range from 128 kilobytes to 512 kilobytes, costing millions of gas for verification. Buterin stated that a well-engineered private transaction costs about 300,000 gas today, but making it quantum-safe pushes that cost to approximately 10 million gas. Under EIP-8288, these costs could be reduced to the low tens of thousands of gas. The proposal works by having transactions declare a short 'dependency' claim (96 bytes) that some message was signed or data satisfies a proof. Mempool nodes would then collect these claims, generate a single recursive STARK proof for all of them, and this consolidated proof would be included in the block. This approach could also lead to the adoption of RISC-V, an open instruction set, as Ethereum's de facto canonical instruction set, a decision Buterin acknowledged as significant. EIP-8288 builds upon Frames, another transaction overhaul proposed by Buterin on Sunday. Buterin hopes to see both EIP-8288 and Frames included in 'I-star,' the network upgrade planned after 'Hegota,' which he views as Ethereum's final upgrade before the 'Lean era.'