Vitalik’s Crypto Metric: A Dance of Numbers 🌀

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Ethereum, that shimmering bauble of blockchain lore, is now fretting over whether its cryptographic systems are as efficient as a witch’s broomstick on a rainy day. Because nothing says “cutting-edge” like asking if your zero-knowledge proofs are doing enough push-ups.

Enter Vitalik Buterin, co-founder and occasional wizard of Ethereum, who’s decided that measuring cryptographic performance via “operations per second” is about as useful as a teapot in a chess match. “Sure,” he says, “but what if your hardware’s had too much tea?” His solution? A new metric called the “efficiency ratio,” which basically asks, “How much slower is your crypto magic compared to just… not using magic?”

Buterin Proposes New Efficiency Metric

Traditionally, cryptographers have clung to “operations per second” like a drunkard to a lamppost. But Vitalik, ever the innovator, suggests we instead calculate the ratio of time spent in cryptography to time spent doing basic math. Because nothing says “progress” like admitting your system is 90% overhead and 10% “oh no.”

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…

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

Vitalik’s ratio is less about your GPU’s caffeine intake and more about how much crypto is slowing things down. It’s like asking, “If I drove to work in a snail, how much longer would I take?” Except here, the snail is a cryptographic algorithm.

The Challenges of Measuring Cryptography

Vitalik also admits that measuring crypto is about as straightforward as herding gremlins. Why? Because some steps can parallelize like a choir, while others sulk in single-file lines. Even his beloved ratio can’t escape hardware’s meddling fingers entirely. But hey, at least it’s not a goat.

Crypto researcher Lukas Helminger, ever the curious soul, points out that FHE and MPC are like cryptographic Russian dolls-open one, and there’s another problem inside. “What network assumptions do we use?” he asks. “How many parties should I invite to the overhead party?” It’s the blockchain equivalent of asking, “How many lice can fit in a hat?”

Any idea how to benchmark the overhead to raw in the FHE/MPC setting? Which network to assume, number of parties etc? It’s not so easily derivable as in the ZK imo

– Lukas Helminger (@luhelminger) October 18, 2025

Vitalik replies that FHE is mostly a solo act, so network overhead is about as impactful as a whisper in a hurricane. But when nodes gather like gossipy gulls, Helminger warns, overhead blooms like a particularly aggressive weed. “Deployed runtime is king,” says Vitalik, “unless the king’s been dethroned by a squirrel.”

Ethereum Scaling Breakthrough

Meanwhile, Brevis has unleashed Pico Prism, a zkVM that can prove Ethereum blocks faster than a caffeinated parrot recites Shakespeare. With 64 RTX 5090 GPUs, it achieves 99.6% of blocks in under 12 seconds-on average, 6.9 seconds. That’s scalability speed, not just “I tried my best” speed.

Excited to see @brevis_zk’s Pico Prism entering the ZK-EVM proving arena!

An important step forward in ZK-EVM proving speed and diversity.

– vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) October 15, 2025

Vitalik calls it a “major advancement,” which is crypto-speak for “this might not collapse under its own weight yet.” The goal? A future where even your grandma’s toaster could validate Ethereum. Or at least her smartphone.

Ethereum’s Ambitious zk-Powered Future

Ryan Sean Adams, crypto investor and occasional futurist, claims Ethereum is taking a path so different from other blockchains, it’s like comparing a symphony orchestra to a kazoo band. He envisions Layer 1 as a global DeFi engine churning out 10,000 TPS, while Layer 2s handle everything else like a well-organized cluttered attic.

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2025-10-18 15:20