Vitalik published Part I of a deep-dive series on indistinguishability obfuscation (iO), which he frames as the "final boss" of cryptography.

Obfuscation converts a program into an "encrypted" version that can be run on cleartext inputs to get cleartext outputs, but completely hides the program's internal workings. He explains that while zero-knowledge proofs prove a statement without revealing underlying data, and functional encryption lets a keyholder decrypt a specific function of data, obfuscation has the potential to simulate a "trustless trusted third party" for virtually any protocol.

The single major exception is that an obfuscated program cannot prevent itself from being copied, meaning it cannot maintain state, which is a gap that blockchains are uniquely positioned to fill. Combining iO and a blockchain could enable secure, private, collusion-resistant voting systems without trust assumptions or committees, as well as secret-sharing DAOs without threshold trust. The primary hurdle to deploying indistinguishability obfuscation is its massive "galactic" runtime. Buterin says recent years have yielded mathematically provable iO schemes under reasonable security assumptions.

.By recursively wrapping succinct functional encryption inside succinct randomized encodings, creators can compile an input-dependent tree of evaluations. Evaluators can recurse down the tree to run the program without gaining any insight into the code itself. The underlying mathematical framework relies heavily on lattices, vectors, and matrices rather than the polynomials and elliptic curves common to SNARKs or STARKs.

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