Vitalik Buterin 60% Odds on Cryptography Cost Reductions for Ethereum Privacy
Ethereum co-founder assigns probabilities to SNARKs, FHE and iO reaching single-digit overhead, with implications for privacy roadmap and intermediary roles.
Vitalik Buterin stated a 60 percent probability that SNARKs, fully homomorphic encryption and indistinguishability obfuscation will reach less than 10 times ordinary computation cost.
He assigned a 33 percent probability that all three reach near-zero additional overhead at scale.
Buterin said there is a good chance at least one, likely SNARKs, reaches single-digit overhead by the end of the decade, though no probability was attached to that timeline.
Ethereum's roadmap separates privacy into private reads, private writes and private proving, allowing incremental advances without waiting for a universal cost collapse across all primitives.
Current FHE benchmarks remain far from ordinary computation, and iO carries the highest prior runtime costs with no specific decade-end probability assigned.