Vitalik Buterin Predicts 60% Chance of Advanced Crypto Tools Reaching Sub-10x Overhead

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has given a personal probability assessment that SNARKs, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), and indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) could eventually operate below 10x computational overhead.

He assigns a 60% chance to this scenario, but notes that the timeline remains narrower than the headline probability suggests.

Buterin believes at least one of these technologies could reach single-digit overhead by 2030, with SNARKs being the most likely candidate.

The distinction matters because it has implications for Ethereum's future architecture and scalability. Lower-cost SNARKs could support higher gas limits without proportional increases in validator hardware.