Vitalik dresses up voting in invisibility cloak 🧙 — still too "galactic" to cast a ballot

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a technical essay on Monday outlining how a cryptographic approach called indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) could one day enable people to vote privately onchain without relying on a trusted group to manage ballots or reveal the result. Writing on his blog, Buterin said iO, 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 reveal the outcome. Removing that dependency could make decentralized governance harder to manipulate, reduce insider interference and allow voters to participate without exposing how they voted, according to Buterin.

Buterin described iO as a form of cryptography that turns software into a protected program: people can run the program and receive the intended output, but they cannot inspect its internal code or extract the data stored inside it. He framed the concept as hiding the code rather than the information being processed. For onchain voting, Buterin said an obfuscated program could contain the logic needed to process encrypted ballots and reveal the final tally without exposing individual votes, eliminating the need for a threshold committee whose members collectively hold the keys required to decrypt the result. Blockchains would still play a key role because an obfuscated program cannot prevent itself from being copied or independently maintain changing information.

Buterin said the technology remains impractical. The most conservative constructions require what he described as "galactic" amounts of computation, while faster approaches rely on less-tested security assumptions, meaning the idea presents a long-term research direction rather than a deployment-ready system. An ideal version of program obfuscation was proven impossible in 2001, sending researchers after the weaker iO target in a roughly two-decade effort littered with broken attempts, though iO can now be built under reasonable security assumptions. Buterin compared the current moment to where SNARKs sat around 2010, before years of optimization turned them from a curiosity into working infrastructure.

The post expanded on Buterin's October 2024 Ethereum roadmap, which first connected iO with private voting and suggested it could provide stronger privacy and resistance to coercion. In April 2025, Buterin proposed a more immediate privacy roadmap for Ethereum, calling for privacy tools to be integrated into existing wallets and for stronger protections against data collection by infrastructure providers that wallets use to access Ethereum. The new essay examined how the underlying cryptography could be constructed, the security assumptions it requires and the technical barriers preventing it from becoming practical.

Buterin distinguished iO from existing privacy mechanisms such as those used by Monero (XMR), which obscures transaction data, including who paid whom and how much, through ring signatures, stealth addresses and confidential amounts. iO, by contrast, hides the program's logic, the code itself, rather than the data flowing through it, a gap that has kept program obfuscation out of production.