Ethereum Community: Release of EIP Proposal for Deposit Contracts Supporting Post-Quantum Computing

The Ethereum community has released a deposit contract EIP proposal that supports post-quantum computing. The proposal aims to introduce a new contract that supports variable-length public keys and credential metadata, along with a clear scheme identifier, where scheme 0 is reserved for the current BLS deposits.

The new contract no longer relies on the Merkle tree structure of the old deposit contract but instead passes deposit information to the consensus layer through execution requests derived from EIP-7685 logs. This contract features an irreversible mode controlled by protocol system calls: deposits are initially disabled, BLS deposits are enabled at a specified timestamp, and BLS deposits are permanently disabled at a later timestamp, with no option for re-enabling. During the migration period, the execution client must merge deposit requests from the new and old contracts.