Vitalik: Ethereum is Exploring Recursive STARK Memory Pools to Address Quantum Security and Privacy Scalability Challenges

On September 22, ETHShanghai 2026, co-hosted by ETHPanda and The Excited Few, officially kicked off in Shanghai. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered an online speech on the topic of EIP-8288.

Vitalik stated that Ethereum is exploring the introduction of a recursive STARK memory pool mechanism to alleviate the conflicts between quantum security, privacy protection, and network scalability. Currently, the cost of quantum-resistant signature verification could reach between 100,000 to 300,000 Gas; transactions involving privacy proofs may consume hundreds of thousands or even millions of Gas. As the application of quantum-resistant signatures and privacy technologies expands, the on-chain verification burden may further increase.

The core idea of this proposal is to separate the execution of signature and proof verification from the on-chain process, allowing memory pool nodes to collect and aggregate relevant cryptographic objects before transaction packaging, ultimately generating a unified proof for verification by the Ethereum main chain. Users will still need to submit transactions along with the corresponding signatures and proofs, but the main chain will not need to process all complex objects one by one, thereby reducing on-chain data and verification overhead. Vitalik views this as a dedicated computational scalability solution for signature and proof verification, which alleviates the burden on the main chain by distributing some computations to network nodes for parallel completion.

This mechanism is expected to bring cost optimization for scenarios such as quantum-resistant transactions, privacy transactions, and Layer 2 state proof submissions. Vitalik mentioned that as the cost of proof verification decreases, the frequency of Layer 2 submitting proofs to Ethereum is expected to further increase, potentially reducing the interval from several minutes to every minute or even less. Additionally, developers can transfer some high-cost computations to client-side execution and then submit the generated proofs for on-chain verification, expanding Ethereum's support for different computational architectures and external applications.

Vitalik believes that this direction reflects the trend of Ethereum's architecture evolving from general-purpose computing to specialized, modular computing, and he mentioned that new instruction sets like RISC-V may gain more application space. Currently, the relevant mechanism is still in the proposal, simulation, and testing stages.