Ethereum plans to restructure its staking deposit contract to "update its security lock" for the post-quantum era.

An Ethereum developer has proposed a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) draft that aims to restructure the existing validator deposit contract, paving the way for the Ethereum staking system to transition to post-quantum cryptography. The proposal plans to replace the contract’s fixed BLS key structure with support for variable-length keys and credential data, with a single entry capped at 8192 bytes, and requires each deposit to specify the "credential scheme" used. Currently, only Scheme 0 is defined, corresponding to the existing BLS signature system; future EIPs can further establish post-quantum validator key standards. The new contract will also introduce three states: "Disabled", "BLS Enabled", and "BLS Permanently Retired". Once a system call triggers the BLS Retired state, new validator staking using the existing BLS scheme will be permanently prohibited and cannot be reactivated. The proposal remains in draft stage and is pending review by EIP editors; the contract address, deployment code, and activation time have not been finalized, and its implementation will require coordinated upgrades between Ethereum’s consensus layer and execution layer. One of the proposal’s authors, Thomas Coratger, noted that post-quantum cryptography is not a straightforward software upgrade. Current Ethereum research prioritizes hash-based signature schemes, whose stateless version has a signature size of roughly 8KB—closely matching the new contract’s 8192-byte cap. The Ethereum Foundation previously established a post-quantum security team. Relevant research indicates that over 65% of ETH is currently held in addresses with on-chain-exposed public keys, and the potential threat of quantum computing to the existing elliptic curve signature system is increasingly becoming a long-term security concern for Ethereum.