Vitalik: Obfuscation cryptography brings milestone progress, but practical application still faces “cosmic-level” performance challenges

Shenchao TechFlow news, June 29, according to Vitalik Buterin's blog post (June 29, 2026), the most powerful primitive in cryptography—indistinguishability obfuscation (iO)—has been theoretically feasible under reasonable security assumptions, but the current scheme's runtime still far exceeds the age of the universe, leaving a huge gap before practical application.

iO can convert any program into an "encrypted program," hiding internal logic while preserving input-output functionality, regarded as the ultimate cryptographic tool approaching a "trustless trusted third party." Combined with blockchain, it theoretically enables high-value applications such as secure and private voting systems without the need for multi-party committees.

The most stringent existing scheme requires nesting multiple layers of cryptographic primitives such as fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), attribute-based encryption (ABE), functional encryption (FE), and randomized encoding (XiO), stacking sub-exponential security parameter requirements, resulting in an overall overhead of λ^10 order, making it practically infeasible.

The article points out that there are three future breakthrough paths: first, optimizing existing technology stacks through algorithmic compression; second, constructing more concise schemes based on more aggressive lattice assumptions (such as diamond iO); third, exploring entirely new constructions that do not rely on lattices at all (such as local hybrid obfuscation). The author believes that once any path succeeds, it will mean that the "problem is basically solved" in cryptography.