Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has quietly redirected a few of his rising on-chain privateness exercise to the encrypted messaging house, donating a complete of 256 ETH to SimpleX chats and periods through the Railgun privateness protocol.
On-chain analytics agency Arkham first flagged the transfer, declaring that “VITALIK simply transferred $2.9 million in ETH to RAILGUN. Vitalik holds over $700 million in ETH and simply transferred $2.9 million to Railgun. What’s he cooking?”
VITALIK transferred $2.9 million $ETH to railgun
Vitalik holds over $700 million in ETH and simply transferred $2.9 million to Railgun.
what’s he cooking? pic.twitter.com/2HvDFRDqi2
— Arkham (@arkham) November 26, 2025
Buterin endorses SimpleX and Session
Shortly after, Buterin confirmed the donation from his vitalik.eth account, making it clear that it was a wager on the subsequent frontier of privateness: permissionless, metadata-enriched messaging. “Encrypted messaging like @signalapp is essential to defending your digital privateness,” he wrote. “The subsequent two essential steps on this house are (i) non-privileged account creation and (ii) metadata privateness,” he mentioned, citing Session and SimpleX as “two messaging apps which can be pushing in these instructions.”
Buterin mentioned he has “donated 128 ETH to every mission” and supplied his official web site to those that want to “comply with” him, pivoting from philanthropy to recruitment. “However please really obtain and use it!”
Transactions to SimpleX and Session have been executed through Railgun, a zero-knowledge privateness system on Ethereum that hides the sender, recipient, token sort and quantity when interacting with good contracts and DeFi protocols.
Buterin, who has repeatedly used Railgun and different privacy-preserving techniques over the previous two years, usually explains that such transfers usually imply “a donation of a portion to a charity, nonprofit, or different mission,” relatively than a private outflow of money. The newest sample matches that story. Funds are despatched to Railgun after which to privacy-focused infrastructure and purposes, this time to the messaging area.
In his publish, Buterin positions encrypted messengers as an essential layer of a broader privateness stack, together with monetary anonymity. He clearly hyperlinks the significance of Sign-style end-to-end encryption to new necessities that transcend content material confidentiality: “permissionless account creation” and “metadata privateness.” The primary is to eradicate reliance on centralized real-world identifiers comparable to cellphone numbers and electronic mail addresses to create accounts. The second targets the far much less apparent however equally apparent depletion of digital communication: who speaks to whom, when, and from the place.
Why Ethereum founders assist each initiatives
Each SimpleX and Session search to handle these points in methods which can be considerably completely different from the mainstream mannequin of cellphone number-based cloud-synced messengers. SimpleX’s personal documentation emphasizes “full privateness of customers’ identities, profiles, contacts, and metadata,” and that the platform has “no identifiers assigned to customers, not even random numbers.”
As an alternative, customers set up a connection through a QR code or hyperlink, and communication routing is designed in order that the service itself can’t reconstruct the social graph. Session initially forked from Sign, however has been rebuilt round onion routing and decentralized service nodes, pushing the same path: no cellphone numbers, Tor-like network-level obfuscation, and an emphasis on minimizing metadata.
Buterin makes it clear that his endorsement isn’t a declare that these apps are already completed merchandise. “Neither software program is ideal, and we nonetheless have a methods to go to realize actually optimum person expertise and safety,” he cautioned. We then outlined the core engineering points that also have to be resolved to ensure that “sturdy metadata privateness” to coexist with the type of comfort that customers now count on from mainstream messengers.
“Robust metadata privateness requires decentralization, however decentralization is tough, and the whole lot is made tougher when customers count on multi-device assist,” he wrote. He additionally cautioned that resistance to Sybil and denial-of-service assaults remains to be an open design space, and mentioned builders have to strengthen it “each on the message routing community and on the person facet (with out forcing a reliance on cellphone numbers).”
The newest donation additionally underscores how Buterin is more and more utilizing his private holdings to drive the ecosystem towards particular priorities: privacy-preserving DeFi, open supply infrastructure, and now metadata-tolerant communication instruments. On this case, he makes a transparent name for higher warning from builders. “These points want extra consideration, and we want all of the groups engaged on these essential points one of the best of luck.”
On the time of writing, Ethereum (ETH) was buying and selling at $3,007.
Featured picture created with DALL.E, chart on TradingView.com
