Vitalik Buterin pushes Ethereum plan to cut quantum-safe privacy costs

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said he hopes EIP-8288 will enter a future Ethereum upgrade. He said the proposal could cut quantum-safe private transaction costs by more than 99%. EIP-8288 would move heavy cryptography out of Ethereum's execution path. Post-quantum signatures currently require 2 or 3 kilobytes. Their verification costs 150,000 to 200,000 gas. STARK proofs require over 128 kilobytes. Quickly generated STARK proofs can require as much as 512 kilobytes. Their verification costs millions of gas. A well-engineered private transaction costs about 300,000 gas today. A quantum-safe private transaction costs roughly 10 million gas. Buterin said both costs would fall to the low tens of thousands under EIP-8288. The proposal would keep the cryptography off-chain. Each transaction would instead include a 96-byte dependency claim. Mempool nodes would collect the claims every second. They would generate one recursive STARK proving all the claims. The block would carry one proof covering everything in it. RISC-V is the leading candidate for the common language used to express statements in recursive proofs. Buterin called adopting RISC-V a big decision that should be taken carefully. He said the change is necessary. Buterin floated the same move in July in a Lean Ethereum roadmap. That roadmap would rebuild almost every major protocol component over three or four years. It would also place recursive STARKs at the core of the protocol. Buterin also described private account abstraction. The approach would keep account logic hidden on-chain. It would then change ownership of every position and holding attached to the account in one transaction without revealing which ones. Buterin co-authored EIP-8288 with Thomas Coratger. The proposal depends on Frames, the transaction overhaul Buterin promoted on Sunday. Frames is unscheduled. Buterin wants EIP-8288 and Frames included in I-star. I-star is the upgrade after Hegota. Buterin has said Hegota will be Ethereum's last upgrade before the Lean era begins. Neither proposal has been assigned to a fork.