Vitalik’s Secret Sauce to Improve ZK and FHE Efficiency (Spoiler: It’s All About Ratios)

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Ah, Vitalik Buterin, the ever-curious co-founder of Ethereum, has decided that the time has come for developers to abandon their beloved raw operations per second (because who needs them, right?) and instead focus on something far more sophisticated and, dare we say, elegant: the overhead ratio. Yes, that’s right, forget the old-fashioned way of measuring performance-now it’s all about comparing cryptographic computations to their trust-based ancestors.

In a tweet that could make even the most die-hard crypto nerd pause and say, “Wait, what?”, Vitalik urged developers to measure “overhead as a ratio” when assessing zero-knowledge (ZK) and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) systems. Why? Because comparing operations per second is, apparently, a bit too pedestrian for Vitalik’s taste. According to him, a ratio reveals the true loss of computational efficiency when you switch from a traditional trust-based system to a fancy, cryptographic one. Seems like a good way to finally figure out how much pain you’re enduring for the sake of security.

“I wish more ZK and FHE people would give their overhead as a ratio (time to compute in-cryptography vs time to compute raw), rather than just saying ‘we can do N ops per second.’ It’s more hardware-independent, and it gives a very informative number: how much efficiency am I sacrificing?”

– vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) October 18, 2025

So, why is this all-important ratio such a big deal? Well, Vitalik believes that it’s “more hardware-independent” and offers a more informative number. Because who wouldn’t want to know exactly how much of your precious computational resources you’re tossing into the cryptographic black hole? And according to our beloved Ethereum visionary, developers can easily calculate this since they already know how long their raw computations take. Simple, right?

Vitalik’s perspective on FHE and ZK

In response to a burning question from X user Lukas Helminger, Vitalik explained the subtleties of benchmarking FHE overhead. Apparently, FHE doesn’t need a network-shocking, I know! It’s a “single-party thing,” he claimed, adding that only the input and final decryption phases involve any sort of external communication. But fear not, those phases aren’t even proportional to the computational workload, so no need to worry about those pesky network issues getting in the way of your math-heavy glory.

“FHE doesn’t require a network, it’s a single-party thing (except for sending the input, and final threshold decryption if you’re doing that, but neither of those are proportional to the compute workload).”

– vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) October 18, 2025

But let’s not get sidetracked by FHE for too long. We’ve got bigger fish to fry-like ZK, which, as you may know, is Ethereum’s crown jewel when it comes to scaling. The Ethereum Foundation seems to think so, too, since they continue to pump resources into ZK tech as the key to Ethereum’s future scalability. And speaking of which, the Foundation recently dropped the Kohaku roadmap, a privacy wallet project that depends heavily on ZK-EVM and ZK-VM frameworks. Because privacy is cool, right?

Ethereum’s broader scaling challenges

At this very moment, Ethereum is stuck in a bit of a quagmire. Each computer on the network checks every single block, and while that’s all fine and dandy when the blocks are nice and small, the gas limit (which controls the data size of a block) keeps rising. That’s when things get tricky. If the blocks get too big, Ethereum validators will find themselves scrambling to keep up. With only about 4 to 8 seconds to check each block every 12 seconds, things could get… well, let’s just say, messy.

In a twist of fate that will probably shock no one, Ethereum developer Dankrad Feist has moved on to bigger and better things, taking his talents to a new Layer 1 blockchain project called Tempo, backed by Stripe and Paradigm. Feist, who had a hand in designing Ethereum’s Danksharding system, is working on ways to get more transactions through the Ethereum network without it breaking a sweat.

All in all, Vitalik’s little pep talk reminds us that when it comes to measuring the efficiency of crypto systems, clarity is key. Developers need to understand the trade-offs they’re making, and hopefully, with a bit of ratio magic, the path to better Ethereum tools will be a bit clearer (or at least, a bit more fun to talk about at crypto parties).

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2025-10-18 11:15