Vitalik Buterin Backs EIP-8288 to Cut Ethereum’s Quantum-Safe Privacy Costs

By Isaac • September 10, 2026 7:34 am •

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is backing a proposal designed to make private and quantum-safe transactions dramatically cheaper by moving most of the proof work out of individual on-chain transactions.

The proposal, EIP-8288, introduces recursive STARK mempools. Instead of every transaction carrying and paying to verify a large cryptographic proof on its own, transactions would declare compact dependencies.

Mempool operators would aggregate many of those claims into a single recursive proof for the block.

Decrypt reports that a dependency would take 96 bytes, while nodes could collect claims on a roughly one-second cycle and produce one proof covering the batch. Buterin estimates that a well-engineered private transaction costs around 300,000 gas today and roughly 10 million gas