Vitalik Buterin Proposes New Way to Measure Ethereum’s Crypto Performance
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The post Vitalik Buterin Proposes New Way to Measure Ethereum’s Crypto Performance appeared first on Coinpedia Fintech News Ethereum is exploring new ways to measure and improve performance of cryptographic systems. Co-founder Vitalik Buterin is now calling for a shift in how developers assess cryptographic systems like zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), aiming to provide them with more meaningful metrics. Buterin Proposes New Efficiency Metric Traditionally, cryptographic performance has been measured in “operations per second” metric, which can be hardware-dependent and sometimes misleading. Instead, Buterin proposes using an “efficiency ratio”, the ratio of computation time when using cryptography versus raw computation time. 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 He notes that this approach is less dependent on hardware, showing clearly how much efficiency is lost by making an app cryptographic. It also makes estimating performance simpler, since developers already know how long the raw computation takes. The Challenges of Measuring Cryptography Vitalik also admits that this is hard because the operations involved are heterogeneous as execution and proof steps can vary, especially with differences in parallelization (SIMD) and memory access patterns. So even a ratio can still be affected by hardware to some extent. Despite these limitations, he believes the overhead factor is still a useful and meaningful metric for evaluating cryptographic performance. Crypto researcher Lukas Helminger asked how to benchmark the overhead of fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) or multi-party computation (MPC), noting that it’s more complicated than in zero-knowledge proofs. He also wondered which network assumptions or…
