Buterin Sees 60% Chance for Cryptographic Breakthrough

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has shared his thoughts on the development of three key cryptographic primitives: SNARKs, FHE, and iO. In a recent analysis, he estimated that there's a 60% chance these technologies will achieve sub-10x overhead by the end of the decade.

This means that running encrypted computations could become almost as cheap as running them in the clear, with a near-zero overhead of 1+ε at large scales. Buterin believes SNARKs are the most mature of the three technologies, with achievable overhead already reaching single digits in specialized scenarios.

For FHE and iO, which are considered more complex and challenging to implement, Buterin expects progress by the end of the decade. He suggests that optimizing existing lattice-based constructions, making stronger cryptographic assumptions, or developing new methods could be key to making iO practical.