Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a technical essay describing how cryptography could one day enable people to vote privately on the network without relying on a trusted group to manage ballots or reveal results.
In Monday’s blog post, Buterin he said a cryptographic approach called indiscernibility obfuscation (iO), combined with blockchain infrastructure, could support private and collusion-resistant voting with “almost zero trust assumption.” This approach would replace threshold committees that collectively decrypt voting data with protected programs designed solely to reveal the result.
Private online voting remains dependent on operator groups protecting information and behaving honestly. According to Buterin, removing this dependency could make decentralized management more complex to manipulate, reduce the risk of insider interference and allow voters to participate in elections without revealing how they voted.
Buterin said the technology remains impractical. He said the most conservative designs require what he called “galactic” calculations. He said faster approaches rely on less tested security assumptions, meaning the idea represents more of a long-term research direction rather than a ready-to-deploy system.
Source: Vitalik Buterin
How indiscernibility obfuscation can protect votes in the chain
According to Buterin, iO is a form of cryptography that turns software into a protected program. People can run a program and get the intended results, but they cannot inspect its internal code or extract the data stored in it. Buterin described this concept as hiding the code rather than the information being processed.
Buterin said that in the case of onchain voting, an obfuscated program could contain the logic necessary to process encrypted ballots and reveal the final result without disclosing individual votes, essentially eliminating the need for a threshold committee whose members collectively hold the keys required to decrypt the result.
Buterin said blockchains will continue to play a key role because an obfuscated program cannot prevent copying or independently maintain changing information.
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Buterin’s broader privacy push
Buterina earlier connected iO with private voting in its Ethereum roadmap published in October 2024. He said this approach could provide greater privacy and resistance to coercion. His latest essay expands on this earlier proposal by examining how the underlying cryptography can be constructed, the security assumptions required, and the technical barriers that prevent it from being used in practice.
In April 2025, Buterin proposed a more direct privacy roadmap for Ethereum, calling for privacy tools to be integrated into existing wallets. The proposal also recommended stronger protections against data collection by infrastructure providers that wallets employ to access Ethereum.
Buterin also drew from his personal resources to fund privacy-preserving technologies. On January 30, it committed 16,384 Ether (ETH), worth about $45 million at the time, to fund initiatives focused on privacy, open infrastructure and sovereignty tools.
