Vitalik: Hopes EIP-8288 will be included in the I-star Upgrade to significantly reduce the cost of quantum-secure transactions

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has published a post detailing the recursive STARK mempool proposal EIP-8288, which he aims to include in Ethereum’s I-star upgrade following the Hegota upgrade. The proposal cuts on-chain computation and data costs by offloading signatures and proofs from Ethereum’s core execution path and recursively aggregating STARKs within the mempool. Vitalik noted that the solution supports low-cost quantum-secure signatures and privacy protocols, with the cost of quantum-secure private transactions projected to drop from around 10 million Gas to tens of thousands of Gas. It is also compatible with new signature or proof schemes such as Falcon and ML-DSA without modifying the EVM, while enabling private account abstraction. Per the design, nodes will periodically aggregate transaction dependencies and generate recursive STARKs, and block builders will produce proofs for transactions slated for inclusion in blocks. Each block’s additional on-chain overhead is approximately a 100–300 KB STARK, plus 96 bytes of data per statement to be proven. The scheme may also drive Ethereum to adopt RISC-V as the standard instruction set for recursive STARKs.