In a strategic shift towards enhancing privacy in digital communication, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has made headlines by donating a total of 256 ETH to two prominent encrypted messaging projects: SimpleX Chat and Session. This move, executed via the Railgun privacy protocol, marks Buterin’s increasing focus on on-chain privacy solutions.
On-chain analytics firm Arkham first highlighted this development, noting, “VITALIK JUST SENT $2.9M $ETH TO RAILGUN. Vitalik holds over $700 MILLION of ETH, and just sent $2.9M into Railgun. What is he cooking?” This substantial amount underscores Buterin’s commitment to promoting privacy-focused initiatives within the blockchain ecosystem.
Shortly after the transaction, Buterin confirmed his philanthropic gesture from his vitalik.eth account, framing the donations as a bet on the next frontier of privacy: permissionless and metadata-hardened messaging. He emphasized the necessity of encrypted messaging tools like those offered by SimpleX and Session in preserving digital privacy, stating, “Encrypted messaging, like @signalapp, is critical for preserving our digital privacy.” He highlighted two crucial advancements in this domain: permissionless account creation and metadata privacy.
In detail, Buterin revealed that he donated 128 ETH to each project, providing their official links as an encouragement for others to contribute and, importantly, to download and use the applications themselves. He expressed a desire to see greater adoption of these tools by users, urging the community to support their development.
The donations were made using Railgun, a zero-knowledge privacy solution on Ethereum that anonymizes the sender, recipient, token type, and transaction amount when interacting with smart contracts and decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols. While Buterin has frequently utilized such privacy-preserving systems over the past two years, he has clarified that these transfers are primarily intended for donations rather than personal cash-outs. His recent actions reinforce this narrative of directing funds into projects tailored for privacy enhancement.
Buterin recognizes encrypted messaging as a vital component of the broader privacy stack alongside financial anonymity. He calls attention to the importance of end-to-end encryption, stressing the need for innovations that address new challenges: the removal of centralized identifiers for account creation and the mitigation of metadata tracking. The latter involves targeting the subtle traces left by digital communications—who interacts with whom, when, and from what location.
Both SimpleX and Session are actively confronting these privacy issues, diverging sharply from conventional phone-number-based messaging apps. SimpleX emphasizes the “complete privacy of your identity, profile, contacts and metadata,” asserting that its platform does not assign any identifiers to users, not even randomized numbers. Instead, it enables connections through QR codes or links, ensuring that the service cannot reconstruct a user’s social graph.
Session, initially a fork of Signal, has been rebuilt to prioritize privacy through onion routing and decentralized service nodes. It eliminates phone numbers, leveraging network-level obfuscation reminiscent of Tor, while also focusing on minimizing metadata.
While Buterin advocates for both messaging platforms, he is realistic about their current capabilities. He acknowledges that neither is a flawless product and stresses the ongoing engineering challenges that must be addressed for achieving optimal user experience and security. He highlights the complexities of decentralization and the necessity of solving issues such as Sybil resistance and denial-of-service vulnerabilities to facilitate rigorous metadata privacy without enforcing phone number dependencies.
Buterin’s recent contributions showcase his intent to propel the ecosystem toward essential priorities like privacy-centered DeFi, open-source infrastructure, and resilience in communication tools. By calling for increased developer focus on these significant issues, he underscores the importance of collective efforts in advancing the privacy landscape. At press time, Ethereum (ETH) was trading at $3,007.
