BlockBeats News, August 26th. Ethereum developers have proposed a new EIP draft to refactor the existing validator deposit contract, paving the way for the Ethereum staking system to transition to post-quantum cryptography.

The proposal plans to change the existing contract's fixed BLS key structure to support variable-length keys and credential data, with a single item limit of 8192 bytes, and requires a "credential scheme" for each deposit statement. Currently, only Scheme 0 is defined, which is the existing BLS signature system. Future EIPs can further define post-quantum validator key standards.

The new contract will also introduce three states: "Disable, BLS Enable, BLS Permanent Retirement." Once in the BLS retirement state via a system call, the addition of new validators' stakes using the existing BLS scheme will be permanently disabled and cannot be re-enabled.

The proposal is currently in the draft stage, pending EIP editing review. The contract address, deployment code, and activation time are yet to be determined. The final implementation will require coordination between the Ethereum consensus layer and execution layer for the upgrade.

One of the proposal's authors, Thomas Coratger, pointed out that post-quantum cryptography is not a simple one-time software upgrade. The current Ethereum research direction is highly focused on hash-based signature schemes, with the stateless version of the signature size being around 8KB, which aligns well with the new contract's 8192-byte limit.

Previously, the Ethereum Foundation has formed a post-quantum security team. Research shows that over 65% of ETH is currently held in addresses where public keys have been exposed on-chain, and the potential threat of quantum computing to the existing elliptic curve signature system is gradually becoming a long-term security issue for Ethereum.