Vitalik: SNARKs are expected to bring their computational overhead down to single-digit multiples by the end of this decade.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a post outlining his optimistic, non-mainstream take on the long-term evolution of cryptography: For general real-world computing, there is a 33% chance that the total cost of three protocols—SNARK, FHE, and iO—can be capped at 1+ε times the baseline computing cost. This means that as computing scale grows sufficiently large, the extra cryptographic overhead relative to baseline costs can approach zero indefinitely. When measured by combined energy consumption and amortized computing costs, these three protocols have a 60% chance of keeping their cost multiple below 10x. One of these targets is likely to be achieved before the end of this decade, with SNARK being the most probable to hit single-digit computing overhead, he added. He noted that this level has already been reached in scenarios involving dedicated hash functions and some large language model (LLM) inference.