Buterin's prose stayed hidden — his math habits didn't 🕵️

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin confirmed on Monday that an AI tool correctly identified him as the anonymous author of a December 2024 revision to EIP-7503, the Zero-Knowledge Wormholes privacy proposal, ending a 13-day challenge he launched on June 22 to test whether artificial intelligence could pierce online anonymity. Buterin acknowledged the result on X after Franklyn Wang, CEO of the AI research engine Co-Invest, said he traced the hidden contribution to Buterin in roughly two hours. The EIP-7503 rewrite now accounts for about 75% of the proposal's text and was approved at the time by original co-author Keyvan Kambakhsh.

Wang said his analysis matched Buterin's reasoning patterns rather than his writing style. Co-Invest ranked Buterin as the likely author with about 20% confidence, roughly 10 times higher than the next candidate across 27 documents reviewed. "The tell wasn't his words, it was his reasoning," Wang wrote. Buterin said he had drafted the revision in Chinese, translated it locally using Alibaba's Qwen2.5 model, and manually corrected the output to disguise his prose. "Notice that the stylistic hints that his AI picked up on were intellectual habits and style of math and algorithm explanation, which bypassed my obfuscation strategy (which only covered prose) completely," Buterin wrote.

The experiment drew comparisons to past stylometry cases, including the 2013 identification of novelist Robert Galbraith as J.K. Rowling, and to ongoing debates over pseudonymous contributors in blockchain communities. Buterin's challenge cited recent research from ETH Zurich and Anthropic arguing that large language models have made online deanonymization practical at scale. Lighter CEO Vladimir Novakovski said Monday he worked with Wang on a 2023 project using GPT-4 to try to identify Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto by matching writing style in cryptography research, but said the effort did not yield a high-confidence result.

Wang argued the same Co-Invest approach could be applied to trading signals by scanning news and on-chain data. Buterin has previously co-authored the Privacy Pools paper and outlined his privacy priorities in the Lean Ethereum roadmap, while the Ethereum developer ecosystem recently passed 1 million contributors. $ETH traded as the identity confirmation circulated.