Ethereum developers submitted a proposal on Monday to rebuild the validator deposit contract in preparation for post-quantum cryptography, as the network’s staking layer holds over $100 billion in assets. The current contract hardcodes BLS12-381 dimensions, fixing public keys at 48 bytes and signature metadata at 96 bytes, while the replacement would accept keys and credential metadata of up to 8,192 bytes each, enabling the adoption of post-quantum algorithms. The new contract would operate in three modes, including an irreversible retirement mode that would permanently block new deposits signed with the current BLS scheme. Implementation would require a coordinated fork across both execution and consensus layers, with activation timestamps still undecided. According to a Project Eleven report, a machine capable of breaking elliptic curve signatures could emerge as soon as 2030, making this upgrade urgent as more than 65% of all ETH sits in addresses whose public keys are already exposed onchain.
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