BLAKE was submitted to the NIST hash function competition by Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Luca Henzen, Willi Meier, and Raphael C.-W. Phan.
BLAKE made it to the final round consisting of five candidates but lost to Keccak in 2012, which was selected for the SHA-3 algorithm.
[1] The 64-bit version (which does not exist in ChaCha) is identical, but the rotation amounts are 32, 25, 16 and 11, respectively, and the number of rounds is increased to 16.
Throughout the NIST hash function competition, entrants are permitted to "tweak" their algorithms to address issues that are discovered.
BLAKE2 is a cryptographic hash function based on BLAKE, created by Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Samuel Neves, Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn, and Christian Winnerlein.
The design goal was to replace the widely used, but broken, MD5 and SHA-1 algorithms in applications requiring high performance in software.
[6] BLAKE2 removes addition of constants to message words from BLAKE round function, changes two rotation constants, simplifies padding, adds parameter block that is XOR'ed with initialization vectors, and reduces the number of rounds from 16 to 12 for BLAKE2b (successor of BLAKE-512), and from 14 to 10 for BLAKE2s (successor of BLAKE-256).
These values are transparently obtained by taking the first 64 bits of the fractional parts of the positive square roots of the first eight prime numbers.
Hash values of an empty string: Changing a single bit causes each bit in the output to change with 50% probability, demonstrating an avalanche effect: In addition to the reference implementation,[5] the following cryptography libraries provide implementations of BLAKE2: BLAKE3 is a cryptographic hash function based on Bao and BLAKE2, created by Jack O'Connor, Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Samuel Neves, and Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn.
BLAKE3 has a binary tree structure, so it supports a practically unlimited degree of parallelism (both SIMD and multithreading) given long enough input.