Vitalik Buterin highlights need for new cryptographic tools in blockchain

Vitalik Buterin stood before attendees at the 12th Global Blockchain Summit in Shanghai and delivered a message that was equal parts technical roadmap and warning siren: the privacy assumptions that blockchain was built on are broken, and fixing them requires an entirely new cryptographic toolkit. The Ethereum co-founder’s core argument is straightforward. Blockchains currently require every node to re-execute every computation, a design choice that worked fine in 2015 but now looks increasingly like a bottleneck. The alternative, Buterin said, is to lean hard into cryptographic proofs, specifically SNARKs, STARKs, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), and indistinguishability obfuscation (iO), to verify computations without re-running them. Why pseudonymity is no longer enough He argued that traditional pseudonymity, the idea that using a wallet address instead of your name keeps you private, is now essentially a polite fiction. Advances in AI and data analytics have made de-anonymizing blockchain users significantly easier. If a sufficiently motivated actor wants to figure out who’s behind a wallet, the tools to do so already exist and are getting better fast. Buterin’s proposed so...