LeanDA: Design and Benchmark

Researchers Long Meng, Benedikt Wagner, George Kadianakis, and Francesco Risitano present LeanDA, an encode+prove post-quantum data availability sampling (DAS) construction for Ethereum that replaces KZG commitments with Reed-Solomon encoding, Poseidon/Merkle hash commitments, and a LeanVM SNARK proof. Benchmarks on an Intel i9-14900 show LeanVM proving throughput of roughly 0.9 MiB/s and Full DAS throughput up to 623.21 KiB/s (rising to 794.57 KiB/s on an AMD EPYC server), with the best results at cell size c=32/64 and row counts around n=12-14. The main bottleneck is Poseidon hashing for commitments and extension-field operations for the RS membership check, and future work includes distributed blob proving, alternative erasure codes, and alternative proof systems.