Poseidon Hash
ZK Compression · Bottom
A cryptographic hash function designed for efficiency inside zero-knowledge proof arithmetic circuits, operating natively over prime fields with roughly 240 R1CS constraints per hash versus SHA-256's ~25,000, making it dramatically cheaper for ZK proof generation. In Solana's ZK Compression ecosystem, Poseidon hashes build Merkle trees verified inside ZK circuits, since SHA-256's bitwise operations are prohibitively expensive in arithmetic constraint models. Solana's SVM exposes a native Poseidon syscall for efficient on-chain computation without pure BPF overhead.