Vitalik Buterin proposes new 'effectivity ratio' to measure cryptographic efficiency
The effectivity ratio compares the encrypted computation time to the uncooked computation time, supplying you with a clearer image of efficiency overhead.
Challenges stay because of heterogeneous operations, parallelization, and reminiscence patterns
Ethereum is exploring new methods to measure and enhance the efficiency of its cryptosystem.
Co-founder Vitalik Buterin is now calling for modifications to the way in which builders consider cryptographic methods akin to zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) and absolutely homomorphic encryption (FHE), with the purpose of offering extra significant metrics.
Buterin proposes a brand new effectivity indicator
Historically, cryptographic efficiency has been measured utilizing a metric referred to as “operations per second,” which is {hardware} dependent and could be deceptive. As an alternative, Buterin suggests utilizing an “effectivity ratio,” which is the ratio of the cryptographic computation time to the uncooked computation time.
I want extra ZK and FHE folks would present the overhead as a ratio (in-cipher computation time vs. uncooked computation time) as a substitute of simply saying “I can carry out N operations per second.”
It’s extra {hardware} impartial and supplies very helpful numbers. In different phrases, how environment friendly is it?
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) October 18, 2025
He factors out that this method is much less {hardware} dependent and clearly reveals how a lot effectivity is misplaced by encrypting apps. It additionally makes it simpler to estimate efficiency as a result of builders already know the way lengthy the uncooked calculations will take.
Challenges in measuring cryptography
Vitalik acknowledges that that is troublesome as a result of the operations concerned are heterogeneous, particularly because the execution and proof steps could be totally different because of variations in parallelization (SIMD) and reminiscence entry patterns. Due to this fact, even ratios could be influenced to some extent by {hardware}.
Regardless of these limitations, he believes that the overhead issue is a helpful and significant metric for evaluating cryptographic efficiency.
Cryptographer Lucas Helminger requested easy methods to benchmark the overhead of absolutely homomorphic encryption (FHE) and multiparty computation (MPC), noting that they’re extra advanced than zero-knowledge proofs. He additionally puzzled what community assumptions and variety of events must be thought-about when calculating overhead.
Is there a strategy to benchmark the overhead in opposition to uncooked in a FHE/MPC setup? What community ought to I assume, variety of events, and so on? It's not as straightforward to derive as in ZK imo.
— Lucas Helminger (@luhelminger) October 18, 2025
Buterin defined that since FHE is usually a single-party course of, community concerns have little affect. Solely small steps akin to submitting enter and performing threshold decoding are essential, and these are negligible in comparison with the computation time.
Helminger identified that in real-world blockchain situations, there could be further overhead when many nodes are concerned. Buterin agreed, however mentioned the uncooked runtime in a deployed configuration nonetheless supplies the clearest image.
Ethereum scaling breakthrough
Most lately, Brevis introduced Pico Prism, a high-performance zkVM for real-time Ethereum block proofs. Utilizing 64 RTX 5090 GPUs, we show 99.6% of blocks inside 12 seconds, taking a mean of 6.9 seconds.
This breakthrough might enhance Ethereum's scalability by as much as 100x and transfer us towards a future the place anybody can validate the blockchain, even from their smartphones. Buterin additionally emphasised that this can be a main development for ZK-EVM, which proves its velocity and flexibility.
Excited to see @brevis_zk's Pico Prism enter the ZK-EVM demonstration enviornment.
Important development in ZK-EVM demonstrating velocity and flexibility. https://t.co/nOeYt9YMvm
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) October 15, 2025
The long run powered by Ethereum's bold zk
Cryptocurrency investor Ryan Sean Adams emphasizes that Ethereum is on a basically totally different path than different blockchains.
He sees this evolving right into a zk-powered chain with layer 1 dealing with international DeFi with excessive throughput (10,000 TPS) and nodes gentle sufficient to run on a telephone. The Layer 2 community handles every thing else, together with general-purpose purposes like Base and Arbitrum and app chains like Author.
