Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin Outlines Private Onchain Voting Using Indistinguishability Obfuscation

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a technical essay outlining how cryptography could one day enable people to vote privately onchain without relying on a trusted group to manage ballots or reveal the result.

In a blog post on Monday, Buterin said a cryptographic approach called indistinguishability obfuscation (iO), combined with blockchain infrastructure, could support private and collusion-resistant voting with “almost no trust assumption.” The approach would replace threshold committees, which jointly decrypt voting data, with protected programs designed only to reveal the outcome.

Private onchain voting remains dependent on groups of operators safeguarding information and behaving honestly. Removing that dependency could make decentralized governance harder to manipulate, reduce the risk of insider interference and allow voters to participate without exposing how they voted, according to Buterin.

However, Buterin said the technology remains impractical. He said the most conservative constructions require what he described as “galactic” amounts of computation. He said faster approaches rely on less-tested security assumptions, which means that the idea presents a more long-term research direction rather than a deployment-ready system.

Source: Vitalik Buterin How indistinguishability obfuscation could protect onchain votes

According to Buterin, iO is a form of cryptography that turns software into a protected program. People can run the program and receive the intended output, but they cannot inspect its internal code or extract the data stored inside it. Buterin described the concept as hiding the code rather than the information being processed.

For onchain voting, Buterin said an obfuscated program could contain the logic needed to process encrypted ballots and reveal the final tally without exposing individual votes, essentially removing the need for a threshold committee whose members collectively hold the keys required to decrypt the result. Buterin said blockchains would still play a key role because an obfuscated program cannot prevent itself from being copied or independently maintain changing information.

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Buterin’s broader privacy push

Buterin previously connected iO with private voting in his Ethereum roadmap published in October 2024. He said the approach could provide stronger privacy and resistance to coercion. His latest essay expands on that earlier proposal by examining how the underlying cryptography could be constructed, the security assumptions it requires and the technical barriers preventing it from becoming practical.

In April 2025, Buterin proposed a more immediate privacy roadmap for Ethereum, calling for privacy tools to be integrated into existing wallets. The proposal also advocated for stronger protections against data collection by infrastructure providers that wallets use to access Ethereum.

Buterin also drew funding from his personal holdings to fund privacy-preserving technologies. On Jan. 30, he earmarked 16,384 Ether (ETH), worth about $45 million at the time, to fund initiatives focused on privacy, open infrastructure and self-sovereign tools.