Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said he believes there is a 60% chance that SNARKs, fully homomorphic encryption and indistinguishability obfuscation could eventually be implemented with single-digit computational overhead, and a 33% chance that all three could approach near-zero additional overhead for large real-world workloads. He added that at least one of the technologies, most likely SNARKs, could reach sub-10x overhead by the end of this decade, noting that specialized hash functions and some LLM inference workloads are already approaching that level.Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said he believes there is a 60% chance that SNARKs, fully homomorphic encryption and indistinguishability obfuscation could eventually be implemented with single-digit computational overhead, and a 33% chance that all three could approach near-zero additional overhead for large real-world workloads. He added that at least one of the technologies, most likely SNARKs, could reach sub-10x overhead by the end of this decade, noting that specialized hash functions and some LLM inference workloads are already approaching that level.September 6, 2026 10
