Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin Shocks Crypto World by Unleashing 256 ETH to Revolutionize Encrypted Messaging—What’s He Building?

Vitalik Buterin donates 256 ETH to two messaging apps.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said end-to-end encrypted messaging is essential for protecting digital privacy, identifying permissionless account creation and metadata privacy as the next major priorities for the sector.

He pointed to Session and SimpleX as two projects working on these areas and disclosed that he has donated 128 ETH to each of them.

Major ETH Donations

In a post on X this week, Buterin said both applications are attempting to strengthen decentralization and enhance user protections without relying on phone numbers, while also addressing challenges such as multi-device support and resistance to Sybil or denial-of-service attacks.

Buterin said the donation addresses are publicly available on the projects’ websites and added that, although the platforms are not yet perfect, they represent active efforts to advance privacy-preserving communication. He also called for more developers to help tackle the technical problems that still remain, and added that these issues “need more eyes on them.”

It is important to note that while Signal has emerged as a widely used encrypted messaging app, it faced renewed scrutiny following a March incident in which senior US national security officials accidentally included a reporter in a Signal group discussing strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen. Days later, a Pentagon-wide advisory warned against using the app for any non-public information, citing a vulnerability tied to its linked-devices feature.

The memo said Russian hacking groups were targeting the users of the app through phishing tactics. Signal later attributed the issue to user-targeted attacks rather than problems with its encryption, and that the company had already implemented safeguards and warnings.

Buterin’s Privacy Push

The Ethereum co-founder has repeatedly spoken this year about treating privacy as a basic necessity for digital systems. Following a recent data breach involving major US banks, where client information from institutions including JPMorgan, Citi, and Morgan Stanley may have been exposed after a cyberattack on mortgage technology vendor SitusAMC, Buterin responded by describing privacy as a form of “hygiene.”

You may also like:

In an essay published in April, he argued that “privacy is an important guarantor of decentralization” and outlined a path for Ethereum to support stealth addresses, selective disclosure, and application-level zero-knowledge tools to help reduce unnecessary data exposure.

More recently, he warned that X’s new geo-inference system, which assigns country labels to user accounts, poses privacy risks. He said such systems can still reveal sensitive location information and may endanger vulnerable users, even when only broad regions are disclosed.