Vitalik Buterin assigns 60% chance to cheap advanced cryptography reshaping Ethereum privacy

Ethereum co‑founder Vitalik Buterin said there is a 60% chance that three advanced cryptographic primitives—SNARKs, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and indistinguishability obfuscation (iO)—will eventually cost less than ten times ordinary computation. He estimates a 33% probability that all three could approach near‑zero overhead at sufficient scale.

What the three primitives could enable

• SNARKs: cheaper zero‑knowledge proofs would make private proofs easier to generate, supporting anonymous voting, private claims and shielded withdrawals.
• Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE): would allow applications to compute directly on encrypted data, enabling confidential automated market makers, private lending pools and sealed‑bid auctions.
• Indistinguishability obfuscation (iO): aims to hide program logic while still allowing verification, potentially replacing trusted intermediaries in voting and other decision‑making processes.

Timeline and likelihood

Buterin indicated a “good chance” that at least one of the three—most likely SNARKs—could reach single‑digit overhead by the end of the decade, though he did not assign a specific probability to that deadline.

Ethereum’s privacy roadmap independent of a single breakthrough

Ethereum’s roadmap separates privacy into private reads, private writes and private proving, allowing progress in each area without waiting for all three primitives to become cheap. Existing proposals include anonymous RPC systems, private information retrieval, oblivious RAM, light clients, frame transactions that separate fee payment, inclusion lists for validators, and keyed nonces to reduce correlation.

Current state of each technology

• SNARKs are the most mature, already used in application‑specific zero‑knowledge systems, though privacy can still leak through wallet reuse or RPC providers.
• FHE remains costly; a 2026 benchmark required multi‑gigabyte artifacts and over six hours of encrypted computation for a small workload.
• iO is still far from practical, with existing methods described as having “galactic” runtimes.

Potential broader impact

Cheaper cryptography could allow proprietary financial models to run on external infrastructure without exposing data or logic, potentially weakening traditional intermediaries such as auditors, custodians, clearinghouses and exchanges.