Buterin dreams of secret ballots onchain — galaxy-sized math budget not included 🌌

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a technical essay on Monday arguing that a cryptographic method known as indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) could eventually allow people to vote privately onchain without depending on a trusted group to handle ballots or reveal results. He said the approach, combined with blockchain infrastructure, could support private and collusion-resistant voting with "almost no trust assumption," replacing threshold committees that jointly decrypt voting data with protected programs designed only to output the final tally.

Buterin described iO as a form of cryptography that converts software into a protected program, allowing users to run the code and receive its intended output while preventing inspection of its internal logic or extraction of the data stored inside. In his blog post, he framed the concept as hiding the code rather than the information being processed. For onchain voting, an obfuscated program could contain the logic needed to process encrypted ballots and reveal the outcome without exposing individual votes, removing the need for a committee whose members collectively hold decryption keys.

Buterin cautioned that the technology remains impractical. He said the most conservative constructions require what he described as "galactic" amounts of computation, and that faster approaches rely on less-tested security assumptions. He positioned the idea as a long-term research direction rather than a deployment-ready system. He added that blockchains would still play a key role, since an obfuscated program cannot prevent itself from being copied or independently maintain changing state.

The essay expands on Buterin's October 2024 Ethereum roadmap, in which he previously connected iO with private voting and said the approach could provide stronger privacy and resistance to coercion. His latest writing examines how the underlying cryptography could be constructed, the security assumptions it requires and the technical barriers standing in the way of practical use. In April 2025, Buterin proposed a separate, more immediate privacy roadmap for Ethereum, calling for privacy tools to be integrated into existing wallets and stronger protections against data collection by infrastructure providers that wallets rely on to access the network.