Ethereum Vitalik Buterin Set New Standards for ZK and FHE Performance

Ethereum Vitalik Buterin has brought a new debate to the cryptography community with a proposal to change the benchmarking of zero-knowledge proof (ZK) and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) systems. This point of view demonstrates the necessity of more practical and precise metrics to be used by developers and researchers of secure cryptography systems.

Vitalik Buterin on ZK and FHE Systems

Currently, the performance of many ZK and FHE projects is demonstrated by referencing the number of operations that can be run per second. But Buterin argues that this measure lacks real-world clarity. Developers, he says, gain little insight into what these numbers mean for their specific applications.

In contrast, he proposes an overhead ratio: the time taken to perform a task with cryptography versus the time required to perform it without encryption. As an illustration, when a calculation that would usually take one second takes 50 seconds when encrypted, the ratio is evidently 50 times higher.

Source: Vitalik X

Why Ratio Matters?

• Less hardware dependency - because it is a relative performance, not an absolute speed.

• Helps developers, who are already aware of the time their raw computation takes, and it is easy to predict cryptographic performance.

• Demonstrates trade-offs - by demonstrating the precise amount of efficiency lost by moving to cryptographically secured systems, rather than trust-based systems.

Although he admits that factors such as parallelization, memory access, and SIMD operations still affect results, Buterin insists that ratios remain far more useful and informative than raw ops/second metrics.

Status of FHE: Millions of Times Slower to Optimized Gains.

• Traditionally, FHE was infamously sluggish in practice--hundreds of millions of times slower than normal computing. However, the recent developments have altered the situation.

• Fully Homomorphic Encryption schemes have been created by companies such as Zama, which provide up to 2300x speed gains since 2022, and can now run approximately 230 transactions per second.

• The potential of hardware innovations is even greater, with GPUs demonstrating up to 784x speed improvements over CPU-based baselines, as illustrated in 2025 literature.

These innovations demonstrate how the measurement by ratio could be more effective in terms of reflecting the actual progress in efficiency.

Progress in ZK Proof Systems

Promising progress is also evidenced by the zero-knowledge proof systems . Prover times in platforms such as Libra and zkVMs like SP1 approach near-linear scaling. In some cases, cryptographic overhead is as low as 20% compared to trusted execution for large workloads.

Still, as Buterin acknowledges, differences in memory usage and hardware designs prevent ratios from being universally constant. However, they offer a more dependable reference point to the developers who assess the cost of the system.

Social Responses and Discussion.

The proposal created a discussion amongst cryptography researchers. Lukas Helminger posed the question of how ratios are applicable in the FHE/MPC context, where parties and network assumptions make comparisons difficult.

Source: X

Buterin made it clear that FHE is fundamentally single-party, except for transmitting inputs and optional threshold decryption, which simplifies ratio benchmarks.

According to Helminger, in blockchain application scenarios, the number of nodes might be extremely high, and therefore, decryption would be costly.

Buterin assented and proposed that bandwidth requirements, network latency rounds, and actual runtime in deployed environments should also be listed as benchmarks in such cases.

Conclusion

The ratio-based benchmarking suggested by Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin is an important move towards making the cryptographic performance metrics more realistic and useful. As these systems are rapidly evolving, this change may lead to increased clarity of the way to scalable cryptographic applications.