Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said there is a 60% probability that SNARKs, fully homomorphic encryption and indistinguishability obfuscation will eventually operate at less than 10 times the cost of ordinary computation. He gave a 33% chance that all three technologies could approach near-zero additional overhead at sufficient scale. Buterin said there is a good chance that at least one technology, probably SNARKs, reaches single-digit overhead by the end of the decade. He did not assign a probability to that specific deadline. SNARKs could enable private proofs without revealing underlying information. Fully homomorphic encryption could let applications compute on encrypted data. Indistinguishability obfuscation aims to conceal software logic while allowing users to run the software. Ethereum can improve privacy before all three technologies become cheap. Its roadmap separates private reads, private writes and private proving. Anonymous RPC systems, private information retrieval, oblivious RAM and light clients could reduce the information exposed when users access blockchain data. Private transactions can still face censorship before inclusion. Fee payers and sequential account nonces can also expose transaction links. Ethereum researchers have proposed frame transactions, inclusion lists and keyed nonces to address those issues. Those mechanisms remain proposals rather than guaranteed upgrades. Existing SNARK designs could support anonymous voting, private claims and shielded withdrawals. Privacy can still leak through wallet reuse, RPC providers, public inputs or weak anonymity sets. A 2026 benchmark required multi-gigabyte cryptographic artifacts and more than six hours of encrypted computation for a small BERT workload. The benchmark covered one application rather than providing a universal performance measure. Specialized coprocessors, narrower workloads and threshold-decryption systems can make encrypted applications practical today. Those approaches add infrastructure and can create new trust assumptions. FHE could support private automated market makers, confidential lending pools and sealed-bid auctions by keeping shared state encrypted. Indistinguishability obfuscation remains further away. Buterin previously described one rigorous approach as carrying "galactic" runtimes. Christopher Inks, founder of Texas West Capital, said cheaper cryptography could let proprietary financial models run on outside infrastructure without exposing private data, model mechanics or intellectual property. Inks argued that these systems could eventually weaken the role of auditors, custodians, clearinghouses and exchanges. The article presents Ethereum's privacy path as a progression from hiding user data to hiding shared financial state and then concealing program logic. The remaining 40% in Buterin's scenario would mean uneven progress rather than a failure of Ethereum privacy.
Vitalik Buterin Estimates 60% Chance Cheaper Cryptography Will Reshape Ethereum Privacy
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Summary
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin estimates a 60% chance that SNARKs, fully homomorphic encryption, and indistinguishability obfuscation will operate at less than 10 times the cost of ordinary computation. He cited a 33% chance all three could approach near-zero overhead at scale. Buterin noted SNARKs may hit single-digit overhead by 2030. These tools could enable private proofs, encrypted data computation, and hidden logic. Ethereum’s roadmap includes private reads, writes, and proving, with frame transactions and keyed nonces proposed. Current SNARKs support private claims and shielded withdrawals, though risks remain. Christopher Inks of Texas West Capital said cheaper cryptography could reduce reliance on auditors. The EVM will need to adapt to support elliptic curve cryptography for these upgrades.
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