Buterin Suggests Possibility of SNARK Costs Below 10 Times

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, mentioned the long-term cost improvement potential of SNARK (Succinct Non-interactive Arguments of Knowledge), Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), and indistinguishability obfuscation (iO). He assessed the probability that these technologies could reduce additional costs in general computation to the level of '1 + ε' at 33%. This implies that as the scale of computation increases, the additional burden from cryptographic processing could become nearly zero compared to the original computation costs. Buterin estimated a 60% chance that all three technologies would incur less than 10 times the cost overhead, suggesting a significant breakthrough in at least one technology by the end of the decade. He highlighted SNARK as the most promising case. SNARK is a cryptographic technology that proves the correctness of specific computations and is related to zero-knowledge proofs, scalability, and privacy technologies in blockchain. Buterin emphasized that the cost of proofs and execution efficiency in the Ethereum ecosystem has been a long-term research project, explaining that his remarks focus on the cost structure of foundational technologies rather than short-term ETH prices or network metrics.