Vitalik Buterin Sees 60% Chance Cryptography Breakthrough Weaks Wall Street Middlemen

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has given his take on the future of cryptography and its potential impact on the financial industry. In a recent statement, he expressed a 60% chance that advanced cryptographic technologies will become cheap enough to reshape Ethereum's privacy features.

The three technologies in question are SNARKs (zero-knowledge proofs), fully homomorphic encryption, and indistinguishability obfuscation. These tools have the potential to move privacy from being a specialized feature to a default layer for financial and computational systems.

Buterin believes that at least one of these technologies will reach single-digit overhead by the end of the decade. However, this timeline is more cautious than his probability estimate suggests.

Ethereum's roadmap for improving privacy separates it into private reads, private writes, and private proving. This allows progress in one area without waiting for a universal cryptographic cost collapse.