Ethereum Co-Founder Sees 60% Chance of Cryptography Breakthrough

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has stated that there's a 60% chance of advanced cryptography becoming cheap enough to reshape the Ethereum network's privacy features.

The technologies he mentioned are SNARKs, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), and indistinguishability obfuscation (iO). SNARKs could make private proofs easier to generate, FHE would allow applications to compute directly on encrypted data, and iO aims to let software run without exposing its internal logic.

Cheaper cryptography would move privacy from a specialized feature toward a default layer for financial and computational systems. However, Buterin's timeline is more cautious than the probability suggests, with him stating that there's a good chance at least one of the three technologies will reach single-digit overhead by the end of the decade.

Ethereum does not need all three technologies to become cheap before making meaningful privacy improvements. Its roadmap separates privacy into private reads, private writes, and private proving, allowing progress in one area without waiting for a universal cryptographic cost collapse.