Vitalik: SNARK Likely to Achieve Single-Digit Computation Overhead by End of Decade

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin on September 6 published a post expressing his optimistic yet non-consensus view on the long-term development of cryptography. He assessed that for general real-world computation, SNARK, FHE, and iO protocols have a 33% probability of keeping total cost within 1+ε times the base computational cost, meaning that as the computation scale grows sufficiently large, the additional cryptographic overhead can approach zero relative to the base cost. When considering combined energy and amortized cost, he estimated a 60% probability of keeping the cost multiplier below 10x. He predicted that it is likely that at least one of these goals will be achieved before the end of this decade, with SNARK being the most likely to reach single-digit computation overhead. He noted that in specialized hash functions and some large language model reasoning scenarios, this level has already been reached.