The call highlights the need for a common performance language across cryptography projects.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has called on developers. Those working in zero-knowledge (ZK) and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) technologies to adopt a clearer way of reporting performance data. In a post shared on X today, Buterin suggested that teams should express efficiency as a ratio.
He compares cryptographic computation time to raw computation time. Rather than only stating how many operations per second they can perform. He explained that this ratio-based approach would help developers better understand. To how much efficiency they lose when replacing traditional trust-based systems with cryptographic methods.
Vitalik Buterin emphasized that using ratios offers a more hardware independent and informative benchmark. He noted that developers already know how long their computations take to process normally. Therefore, if they know the efficiency ratio, they can easily calculate the expected performance overhead of cryptographic operations.
"It gives a very informative number: how much efficiency am I sacrificing by making my app cryptographic instead of trust-dependent?" Buterin wrote. He acknowledged that this measurement is not perfect since different operations. Especially those involving parallelization or memory access, can vary across hardware setups. Still, he believes the ratio method provides a more universal standard for comparing different ZK and FHE implementations.
Following his post, several cryptography experts joined the discussion. Lukas Helminger pointed out that benchmarking FHE systems can be more complex than ZK ones. Because of variables like network configurations and the number of participating parties. Vitalik Buterin responded by clarifying that FHE typically involves a single party.
Except for limited instances like input submission or final threshold decryption. These processes, he said, are not directly proportional to computational workloads. Helminger agreed but added that for blockchain use cases. The performance of threshold decryption still depends on network size. Buterin concurred, suggesting that bandwidth requirements and network latency should also be measured. To give a realistic picture of performance in deployed systems.
Other researchers echoed Vitalik Buterin's call for standardization. Matt McAteer noted that proof size ratios, comparing proof bytes to computation size. These are equally important for understanding scalability in ZK systems. Muhammad Azhar added that efficiency ratios could help unify comparisons across different hardware and cryptographic schemes. He argued that relying only on raw operations-per-second benchmarks hides the real-world performance impact. Particularly for applications needing low latency.
Vitalik Buterin's comments highlight an ongoing challenge in cryptography. The lack of consistent metrics for comparing performance across different schemes and hardware. As ZK proofs and FHE continue gaining traction in blockchain, AI and privacy-focused applications. Standardized benchmarks could accelerate progress and transparency. By encouraging developers to publish efficiency ratios. Buterin aims to bring clarity to a complex field. One where the cost of privacy and security is often hidden behind impressive sounding performance numbers.