Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has urged developers in the zero-knowledge (ZK) and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) space to adopt a more transparent and practical way of measuring computational efficiency.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Buterin suggested that researchers and engineers should express their cryptographic overhead as a ratio, comparing the time it takes to compute within cryptography versus computing raw operations, rather than relying on vague benchmarks like “N operations per second.”
According to Buterin, this approach would provide a hardware-independent performance metric, allowing developers to better understand how much efficiency is being sacrificed when moving from traditional, trust-based computation to cryptographic computation. “It gives a very informative number: how much efficiency am I sacrificing by making my app cryptographic instead of trust-dependent?” he explained.
He added that this ratio-based model is also more useful for estimation, since developers already know the raw computation time of their applications. By simply multiplying by the overhead factor, they can estimate cryptographic performance without complex hardware dependencies.
Buterin acknowledged that achieving a perfect ratio is difficult due to the heterogeneous nature of operations, such as differences in proving versus executing, parallelization, and memory access patterns. However, he emphasized that even with imperfections, an “overhead factor” remains a valuable and consistent indicator of system efficiency across various hardware setups.
His remarks come as ZK and FHE technologies continue to gain traction across blockchain scalability, privacy, and decentralized computing. By advocating for standardized and accessible benchmarking methods, Buterin is once again pushing for a more transparent and developer-friendly framework in next-generation cryptography.
