Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co-founder, estimates a 60% probability that three advanced cryptographic technologies will eventually become cost-effective enough to transform privacy across blockchain and financial systems.
On September 6, Buterin said SNARKs, fully homomorphic encryption, and indistinguishability obfuscation could reach less than 10 times the cost of ordinary computation. He assigned a 33% probability that all three could approach near-zero overhead at sufficient scale. He identified SNARKs as the most likely of the three to reach single-digit overhead by the end of the decade, though he did not assign a specific probability to that timeline.
Current and Near-Term Privacy Tools
Ethereum does not need all three technologies to mature before meaningful privacy improvements occur. The network's privacy roadmap separates advancement into private reads, private writes, and private proving, allowing progress in individual areas.
SNARKs already enable users to prove that a private computation is valid without revealing underlying information. Existing design patterns support uses such as anonymous voting, private claims, and shielded withdrawals, though privacy can still leak through wallet reuse, RPC providers, or weak anonymity sets.
Anonymous RPC systems, private information retrieval, oblivious RAM, and light clients can improve how users access blockchain data while limiting exposure of their identity or query information. Ethereum researchers have proposed frame transactions, inclusion lists, and keyed nonces to address constraints in private transactions, though these remain proposals.
Broader Applications of Mature Cryptography
Fully homomorphic encryption would enable multiple users to interact with shared data while keeping that state encrypted, essential for applications such as private automated market makers, confidential lending pools, and sealed-bid auctions.
A 2026 benchmark demonstrated the current limitations: a small workload required multi-gigabyte cryptographic artifacts and more than six hours of encrypted computation. Developers can implement workarounds using specialized coprocessors or threshold-decryption systems, but these add infrastructure and trust assumptions.
Indistinguishability obfuscation would allow software to run and be verified without exposing its internal logic. Potential applications include coercion-resistant voting and encrypted protocols that disclose only authorized outputs. Buterin has previously described rigorous approaches to iO as carrying "galactic" runtimes, while newer methods remain unproven.
Implications for Financial Infrastructure
Christopher Inks, founder of Texas West Capital, noted that cheaper cryptography could allow proprietary financial models to run on outside infrastructure without exposing private data, model mechanics, or intellectual property. Such systems could eventually reduce the roles of intermediaries including auditors, custodians, clearinghouses, and exchanges.
The progression moves from hiding user data to hiding shared financial state and eventually the logic of programs operating on it. If protection costs fall significantly, the result could be a new class of financial infrastructure rather than simply more private blockchain transactions.
Buterin's remaining 40% probability scenario does not imply privacy failure but rather suggests progress would likely remain uneven, with useful protections arriving through specialized systems while general encrypted computation remains expensive.
