Lately, I keep wondering how much faster a hash-based signature scheme could get with BLAKE3 under the hood.
I made a rough LeanSig proof of concept using BLAKE3. Compared with the Poseidon version, it achieved approximately:
- 3× faster key generation
- 6.7× faster signing
- 13.5× faster verification
These are native Rust benchmarks on an Apple M4 Pro, using the W1 target-sum parameter set with a key lifetime of 262,144 epochs. The benchmark notes include the timings, setup, and serialized sizes.
More ideas and experiments with BLAKE3 to come.