Vitalik Buterin Pushes Ethereum Plan to Slash Quantum-Safe Privacy Costs

In brief

• EIP-8288 would bundle quantum-resistant signatures and STARK proofs into a single proof per Ethereum block.
• Buterin says private transactions that cost about 10 million gas to make quantum-safe today could fall to tens of thousands.
• The proposal is a draft and builds on Frames, the transaction overhaul he pushed on Sunday.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said on Wednesday that he hopes to see a proposal cutting the cost of quantum-safe private transactions by more than 99% included in a future network upgrade.

EIP-8288, which he co-authored in June, would move the heaviest cryptography out of the network's execution path. Post-quantum signatures currently run to 2 or 3 kilobytes and cost 150,000 to 200,000 gas to verify.

STARK proofs are worse, at over 128 kilobytes and as much as 512 kilobytes when generated quickly, which puts verification in the millions of gas. A well-engineered private transaction costs about 300,000 gas today, Buterin tweeted, and roughly 10 million if you want it quantum-safe. Under EIP-8288,  Buterin said, both would land in the low tens of thousands.

It works by not putting the cryptography on-chain at all. A transaction instead declares a "dependency"—a short claim that some message was signed by some key, or some data satisfies some proof—costing 96 bytes. Mempool nodes then collect those claims every second, generate a single recursive STARK proving all of them at once, and pass it on. The block carries one proof covering everything in it.