Vitalik: Generic STARK overhead may drop to double digits; Poseidon remains valuable

The significance here is twofold: it signals that generic STARK efficiency gains could soon erode the performance advantage of specialized hash functions like Poseidon, while simultaneously affirming that Poseidon's near-term utility in privacy-focused SNARKs remains intact. This matters for protocol designers weighing trade-offs between standardization and optimization, as well as for teams building privacy layers that depend on fast client-side proofs. The open question is whether the projected drop in overhead materializes on the timeline implied, and if so, how quickly adoption shifts away from bespoke primitives toward generic frameworks.