Vitalik Buterin thinks the holy grail of cryptography is closer than most people realize, and he’s putting numbers on it. In a September 6 analysis, Ethereum’s co-founder estimated a 60% probability that three of the most important cryptographic primitives, SNARKs, fully homomorphic encryption, and indistinguishability obfuscation, will achieve sub-10x overhead when factoring in combined energy consumption and amortized computing costs.
He went even further, putting a 33% chance on those same technologies reaching near-zero overhead (expressed mathematically as 1+ε) at large scales. Translation: there’s roughly a one-in-three shot that running encrypted computations could become almost as cheap as running them in the clear.
Three technologies, one ambition
SNARKs (Succinct Non-interactive Arguments of Knowledge) let you prove something is true without revealing the underlying data. They’re the backbone of zero-knowledge proofs, which power everything from Ethereum’s Layer 2 rollups to privacy-preserving transactions.
FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption) allows computation on encrypted data without ever decrypting it.
