Beyond Hardware Limitations: Vitalik Advocates Measuring the True Performance of ZK and FHE by "Efficiency Ratio" Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently proposed new suggestions for the performance evaluation methods in the fields of zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), and responded to community concerns about how to ensure hardware independence. He advocated for the adoption of metrics that better reflect the efficiency losses of the cryptographic technology itself, and suggested using a comprehensive metric that combines publicly available hardware with economic and energy consumption costs for evaluation. 1. 🚀 The limitations of traditional performance metrics Vitalik pointed out that many current ZK and FHE developers are accustomed to using "executions per second" (or similar speed metrics) to present performance. The limitation of this metric is that it heavily relies on the specific hardware configurations on which it is run. The number of operations per second measured on high-performance servers can differ greatly from the results measured on ordinary personal computers, making it difficult to make fair and meaningful comparisons between different technical solutions. This hardware dependency obscures the efficiency of the cryptographic algorithms themselves, failing to clearly answer the core question that is crucial for developers: "How much raw efficiency have I sacrificed to achieve cryptographic security?" 2. 💡 New evaluation metric: "Efficiency Ratio" To solve the above problems, Vitalik strongly recommends using "the ratio of encrypted computation time to original computation time" as the core evaluation metric. This ratio can be intuitively understood as the "overhead factor," which measures how many times the time required for encrypted computation is compared to the time needed for the same original (unencrypted) computation. The main advantage of this ratio lies in its hardware independence. Regardless of the hardware used, this ratio can relatively stably reflect the performance loss introduced by the encryption technology itself, allowing developers to focus more on optimizing and comparing algorithm efficiency. Vitalik also acknowledges that due to the differences in execution efficiency of different computational operations on hardware (operational heterogeneity), this ratio will still be affected by hardware, but he believes it remains a far more informative measure than traditional metrics. 3. ⚙️ Ensure the independence and feasibility of the evaluated hardware In response to community concerns about "how to ensure hardware independence" and "whether expensive dedicated hardware is necessary," Vitalik provided a clear and pragmatic response. He suggested that evaluations should be based on "publicly available hardware" rather than expensive or custom dedicated hardware, which ensures the universality and accessibility of the evaluation benchmarks. More importantly, he further proposed a more comprehensive "reasonable first-pass metric": calculating the geometric mean of the capital expenditure (in dollars) per second of operation and the energy consumption (in joules) per operation for the encrypted operations compared to the original operations. This comprehensive metric expands performance evaluation from a purely speed dimension to the economic cost (capital expenditure) and energy efficiency (energy consumption) dimensions, providing decision-makers with a more holistic perspective on efficiency trade-offs. 4. 🌐 The significance of new indicators for industry development The methodological shift advocated by Vitalik is of significant importance for the healthy development of ZK and FHE technologies. It encourages developers to focus more on the core efficiency of cryptographic technologies themselves, promoting optimizations at the algorithmic level, rather than merely relying on more powerful hardware to improve performance. A unified and more comparable assessment standard will help facilitate fair competition and technological advancement among different projects. Ultimately, this will assist the entire industry in finding a better balance between security and efficiency in the transition from a "trust reliance" model to a "cryptographic security" model, laying a solid foundation for building the next generation of secure and efficient blockchain and privacy computing applications.

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