vitalik

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a new article introducing a novel cryptographic obfuscation technology called Diamond iO. This technology aims to address the extremely low efficiency of traditional indistinguishable obfuscation schemes, allowing programs to run while hiding internal logic and critical data. Although traditional iO technology possesses strong privacy protection capabilities, its operational costs are prohibitively high, making it nearly impractical. Diamond iO, by adopting more aggressive new cryptographic assumptions, enhances computational efficiency from "universe-level time consumption" to "planet-level time consumption," bringing it closer to practical application.Diamond iO is built on technologies such as Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) and Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). By encrypting programs, it allows users to execute the encrypted programs and obtain correct outputs without being able to view the internal code or hidden keys. This solution introduces a new input encoding mechanism and conditional decryption method, reducing computational complexity while ensuring the program logic remains hidden. Its core application scenarios include protecting programs that contain private keys, enabling secure software licensing, constructing trustless cryptographic services, and supporting blockchain and artificial intelligence systems with stronger privacy protection.However, Diamond iO is still in the early research stage, and its security relies on new cryptographic assumptions, including All-Product LWE and Evasive LWE, which require further research validation. At the same time, the technology still faces efficiency challenges such as high computational overhead and circuit depth limitations. Researchers believe that by optimizing underlying hash functions, improving homomorphic encryption schemes, and reducing security parameter requirements, Diamond iO is expected to become an important direction for advancing practical program obfuscation technology in the future.

Vitalik posted on the X platform stating that a new type of "high-level programming language" worth trying is a language compiled to Lean (or HOL, etc.), focusing on making it as easy as possible for humans to read definitions and theorems. Rather than proofs, because proofs only need to be correct, the key lies in the definitions and theorems themselves. The envisioned use is that AI outputs a large segment of proof, and the reader needs to understand as easily as possible which precise claims have actually been proven in these outputs.

Vitalik posted on the X platform stating that he has developed a toy demonstration version of the idea of a "censored anonymous bulletin board" on Aztec. This idea comes from his previous article on using SNARKs, and it is still in the early stages, but it can already achieve interesting and non-trivial functionalities.

Vitalik posted on the X platform, stating that AI 2040 and its critics have incompatible worldviews regarding the speed and significance of AI progress. AI 2040 believes that unless strong measures are taken to completely prevent it, some form of superintelligence will emerge in various scenarios by 2040; critics argue that AI 2040 underestimates human coordination capabilities and threatens freedom, but do not view ASI itself as a risk of power concentration.He believes that if he were convinced that the current form of AI is just an ordinary technology, he would be closer to the critics' camp; if he were convinced that superintelligence would inevitably arrive by 2030, he would be closer to the AI 2040 camp. At the same time, due to significant uncertainty, he remains open to the idea of slowing down or pausing, and feels uncomfortable with the stance proposed by some large AI companies and intellectuals that "open source is detrimental, and the ideal outcome is to maintain global control dominance."Vitalik stated that an important reason he supports the d/acc platform is that directions such as formal verification, cryptography, secure and open hardware, pandemic resilience, defensive biotechnology, food and basic resource security, public cognitive systems, and non-concentrated power physical security are worth promoting under both worldviews. He also mentioned that the 2040 plan has increasingly supported open source and incorporated the idea of "mutual assured destruction of computational power," which is an improvement compared to allowing a few participants to selectively deprive their identified subjects of rights.There is no way to avoid trade-offs regarding whether to slow down or pause, and Vitalik believes that trigger conditions can be preset, allowing for a more open attitude towards slowing down or pausing when sufficient conditions are met within a specific timeframe.He also stated that if he were Elon Musk or Zuck, he would significantly transform Twitter into a platform that helps identify and facilitate such large win-win agreements, encouraging more people to participate in discussions, but he thinks this might also be naive. Currently, he does not see any non-naive ASI transition response plans, so he tends to show some tolerance towards those who are trying.

Vitalik Buterin posted that there is a winner in the AI anonymous recognition challenge experiment he previously initiated. In this experiment, he wrote the Chinese version of EIP-7503 (Zero-Knowledge Wormhole) in 2024, manually corrected after using Qwen 2.5 for local translation, in an attempt to hide his identity.The article states that although the prose style was effectively blurred, the AI successfully identified it by detecting unique thinking habits in mathematics and algorithm explanations (such as specific numerical examples and logical chains), completely bypassing its obfuscation strategy that only targeted prose.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published the proposal "The Extremely Lean Chain," demonstrating how to radically compress the state requirements of the Ethereum consensus chain in the context of the "Lean" upgrade. This plan shifts responsibility to validators, who manage and periodically prove their state through ZK proofs, thereby eliminating the processing burden for each epoch and potentially supporting millions of validators.The core mechanisms include: removing the validator public keys from the on-chain state, storing only the deposit tree index; canceling real-time reward and penalty processing, with validators generating daily STARK proofs of their participation and updating balances; completely re-randomizing validator identities daily, achieving strong anonymity through ZK-STARK, with withdrawal addresses exposed only at the time of withdrawal and not publicly linked to deposits or on-chain activities. Vitalik stated that based on upgrades such as single-slot finality and quantum-resistant signature aggregation, the state requirement per validator could be compressed from approximately 180 bytes to 6 bytes. The daily proof cost for a single validator requires processing about 5400 Merkle branches, which can be completed within 1 hour on ordinary hardware, and the on-chain burden can be reduced through aggregated proofs. Additionally, this design can achieve a "virtually free" single secret leader election function, with 1 day as the conservative cycle length and 1 hour as the lower limit.

According to a post by Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum researchers recently held a meeting in Berlin to update the long-term development roadmap of the protocol (strawmap.org). Vitalik pointed out that "Lean Ethereum" is not a one-time upgrade, but a series of improvements that will be phased in over the next three to four years, with an importance comparable to the "Merge," covering almost every core module of the protocol.The main content includes: Verification Mechanism: Introducing recursive STARKs to replace the existing direct re-execution method, becoming a core component at the protocol level; Quantum Security: Significantly elevated priority, all quantum-vulnerable components will be replaced, and the design for quantum-safe Blobs is in progress; Consensus Layer: Decoupling usable chains from finality, achieving one to two rounds of finality, with better security and lower latency; State Layer: The existing dynamic state remains unchanged, but new types of states with greater scalability (such as UTXO storage, circular buffers, etc.) will be added, with an expectation that by 2030 Ethereum will have 2 TB of dynamic state + 100 TB of new type state, allowing for over 10 times reduction in Gas fees after the migration of applications like ERC20 and NFTs; Privacy: Upgrading from an additional feature to a primary goal, integrated into designs such as Mempool and state trees; VM: Introducing leanISA or RISC-V beyond EVM, with the long-term goal of direct protocol layer only.

According to Onchain Lens monitoring, Vitalik Buterin has just transferred 79 ETH through the privacy protocol RAILGUN, worth $137,000.

Vitalik Buterin published an article titled "Obfuscation: building the final boss of cryptography (Part I)", systematically outlining the entire technical tree behind the mainline of the obfuscation protocol (iO). The article points out that obfuscation technology can transform programs into "encrypted programs", allowing computations on plaintext inputs while hiding internal logic. Theoretically, it can achieve "trustless trusted third parties", and when combined with blockchain, it can build nearly trustless voting systems, auction protocols, and various other applications. However, the current iO scheme, while technically polynomial time, incurs enormous practical overhead, with expected runtimes exceeding the lifespan of the universe.The article details the construction process of lattice-based iO, covering the stacking of primitives such as fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), attribute-based encryption (ABE), obfuscated circuits, function encryption, and XiO. Vitalik stated that the field has moved from "impossible" to "provably secure" over the past decade, but there remains a significant gap to practical application. He proposed three future paths: further optimizing the existing lattice-based route, adopting bolder cryptographic assumptions to simplify constructions, or exploring entirely new assumptions that are completely different from lattices, emphasizing that if any direction succeeds, it will largely "solve cryptography", enabling any protocol describable by an ideal trusted third party to be securely implemented.

According to Onchain Lens monitoring, a wallet associated with Vitalik "0xD04" transferred 7,000 ETH (worth $11.06 million) to a new wallet. Based on the historical transaction records of this address, this ETH is likely to be deposited into a CEX.Previously, it transferred 1,300 ETH (worth $31.6 million), which was then deposited into Paxo. The wallet currently holds 20,001 ETH (worth $31.6 million).

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, stated that the Ethereum Foundation (EF) has announced a budget cut of approximately 40% this year as part of its financial transformation plan.According to the funding management policy released last year, EF is gradually transitioning from an "expenditure-based organization" to an "endowment-based model," aiming to reduce the annual expenditure ratio from about 15% to approximately 5% after 2030. In this process, the foundation emphasizes that it will accept inevitable personnel and resource adjustments and acknowledges the loss of some capabilities and experience.In this round of restructuring, EF has reduced approximately 54 employees, accounting for about 20% of the overall team. Vitalik stated that many of these departing members may continue to participate in the Ethereum ecosystem in external forms in the future. Meanwhile, the foundation will shift its strategic focus to a more "lightweight" protocol governance and development path, including advancing the "Strawmap" long-term roadmap, covering core protocol upgrades such as consensus mechanisms, privacy technologies, account models, and state structures, and promoting Ethereum's evolution into its third phase.In terms of specific structural adjustments, EF will weaken the "multi-client redundancy priority" model and shift towards a development approach based more on specialized division of labor and AI-assisted formal verification; the privacy and scalability research team PSE will be restructured, transitioning from exploratory R&D to more focused engineering implementation; the scale of ecosystem activities such as Devcon will also gradually be reduced.In addition, EF will reduce investments in large cross-domain projects in the future, placing greater emphasis on protocol security and high-value improvements, while encouraging more innovative work to be completed externally. Although the path is more streamlined, Ethereum will continue to strengthen its core positioning as a highly censorship-resistant and long-term stable protocol.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that there have been recent voices suggesting that AI text analysis will make online anonymity difficult to maintain.To this end, he revealed that at some point in this decade, he had anonymously authored a public document of moderate importance to Ethereum, estimating that there are about 200 to 2000 documents in the Ethereum ecosystem that are of no less importance than that document.Vitalik invited the community and AI tools to "find" this anonymous work among these documents, in order to test whether AI can de-anonymize authors in large-scale texts through methods such as stylistic analysis.

Hsiao-Wei Wang, the first Chinese Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation, announced her resignation today. In the announcement, she stated, "I have decided to prioritize my personal life and future direction. Now is the right time to step back and I am still contemplating what my next steps should be." In response, Vitalik Buterin praised Hsiao-Wei Wang's contributions, stating that she has been a "steadfast contributor to the Ethereum ecosystem for the past decade" and expressed his "anticipation for her next adventures."On March 10, 2025, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) announced that Hsiao-Wei Wang (Chinese name: Wang Xiaowei) was promoted to board member, becoming the first Chinese leader to rise from the technical grassroots to the board in the seven years since EF's establishment.

Vitalik Buterin once again proposed the concept of "synthetic stable assets," stating that the object of stability anchoring does not necessarily have to be the US dollar. He indicated that the core demand of users for stablecoins is price stability for future expenditures, but if the crypto ecosystem is built on US dollar-backed stablecoins, it is difficult to claim true decentralization.

Vitalik posted on platform X, stating that building index-tracking assets based on options rather than debt is worth considering and trying, using options as the foundation of DeFi instead of CDPs and liquidation mechanisms. This design can avoid the extreme price fluctuations that cause severe and global liquidation effects, allowing exposure to the index to deviate from preferred exposure in a smoother secondary manner.Its key advantage is that it does not require instant oracles and can operate based on slow oracles, which are the types of oracles used in prediction markets. The design has a clear drawback, which is the need for regular rebalancing, and it remains to be clarified whether and how rebalancing can have sufficient slippage resistance.Vitalik added that compared to relying on oracles that must provide real-time answers and may be induced to give incorrect real-time answers without human remediation time, he believes that holding algorithmic stablecoins placed within such mechanisms is safer.