Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin introduced EIP-8288, aiming to incorporate a recursive STARK memory pool in the upcoming I-star upgrade after Hegota. This proposal seeks to move signatures and proofs out of the core execution path, aggregating them in the memory pool before being added to the blockchain.

Transactions carry dependency frames, declaring "certain signatures or conditions are met," while the original large proofs remain off-chain. Nodes periodically consolidate non-expired transactions, generate recursive STARKs, and broadcast the encapsulation; block builders then produce the final proof for the transactions intended for packaging. Each blockchain will bear an additional burden of about 100 to 300KB for STARKs, plus 96 bytes for each statement to be proven. The gas cost for quantum-safe privacy transactions is expected to drop from around 10 million to tens of thousands. The proposal allows for the integration of post-quantum signatures like Falcon and ML-DSA without modifying the EVM, and supports private account abstraction. The candidate instruction set for recursive proofs points to RISC-V. The proposal was co-drafted with Thomas Coratger and is built on EIP-8141 frame transactions, currently in draft form.

The bandwidth logic involves nodes exchanging transaction bodies along with an aggregated proof, rather than attaching a complete post-quantum signature to each transaction. Builders only need to verify the final block collection once, avoiding the expensive verification for each transaction at the execution layer.

In terms of market mechanisms, this shifts the proof cost from the execution layer to the memory pool and builders. Beneficiaries include privacy protocols, post-quantum wallets, and account abstraction wallets; those under pressure are the old precompiled paths that still charge per transaction for verification, as well as nodes and relays that must upgrade their provers. The decrease in gas costs will change the frequency of sendable privacy transactions but will not directly alter ETH issuance.

The scope of I-star has not yet been locked down. The draft can be included in a fork, depending on whether clients and builders accept the engineering burden of RISC-V proof loops.

Source: Public Information