Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has unveiled EIP-8288, a proposal for a recursive STARK mempool mechanism aimed at addressing rising verification costs associated with quantum-resistant signatures and privacy technologies. The proposal would separate signature and proof verification from on-chain execution by having mempool nodes aggregate cryptographic objects into a unified proof before submission to Ethereum mainnet. Verification-related costs currently range from 100,000 to more than 1 million gas per transaction, with post-quantum signature verification estimated at 100,000 to 300,000 gas and privacy-proof transactions consuming hundreds of thousands or more than 1 million gas. Buterin said the approach could reduce Layer 2 proof submission intervals from several minutes to less than one minute and broaden support for computing architectures including RISC-V. EIP-8288 remains in the proposal and simulation-testing phase as Ethereum develops a more modular computation model. The proposal was presented during ETHShanghai 2026 in Shanghai, which opened on Sept. 22 and was jointly organized by ETHPanda, PANews and The Excited Few.