Ethereum developers have proposed a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal that would restructure the current validator deposit contract and lay groundwork for moving Ethereum’s staking system toward post-quantum cryptography, according to BlockBeats on Aug. 26.
Under the draft, the contract’s fixed BLS key structure would be replaced with support for variable-length keys and credential data, with a cap of 8,192 bytes for each item. Each deposit would also have to declare the credential scheme it uses.
The draft currently defines only the existing BLS scheme
At this stage, the proposal defines only scheme 0, the current BLS signature system. Future EIPs could add standards for post-quantum validator keys.
The new contract would also add three states: disabled, BLS enabled, and BLS permanently retired. Once the contract enters the BLS retirement state through a system call, new validator staking deposits using the current BLS scheme would be permanently barred, with no way to restore that option later.
Key implementation details are still undecided
The proposal remains in draft form and is still awaiting review by EIP editors. The contract address, deployment code, and activation date have not been determined. Any final rollout would also require a coordinated upgrade across Ethereum’s consensus and execution layers.
Thomas Coratger, one of the proposal’s authors, said post-quantum cryptography is not a simple software upgrade. Ethereum research is currently paying close attention to hash-based signature schemes, whose stateless versions are about 8 KB in size, roughly in line with the new contract’s 8,192-byte limit.
Post-quantum security is drawing sustained attention
The Ethereum Foundation has previously formed a post-quantum security team. Related research shows that more than 65% of ETH is currently held in addresses whose public keys are already exposed on-chain, making the potential threat that quantum computing poses to today’s elliptic-curve signature system a growing long-term security issue for Ethereum.