When Ethereum falls, privacy rises

Vitalik Buterin recently sent a 256 ETH grant to two messaging projects, Session and SimpleX Chat, without the usual ecosystem fanfare.

The gesture was modest in size but pointed in intent, because both applications occupy a part of the internet that rarely gets real support: metadata-resistant communication.

Their designs tackle the parts of digital messaging that encryption alone cannot protect, the structural details that reveal who is speaking, how often, and across which networks.

Buterin’s donation draws attention to this area with unusual clarity, highlighting two projects built to reduce the information that modern platforms routinely broadcast by default.

Session and SimpleX don’t rely on Ethereum, don’t use accounts tied to a blockchain, and don’t integrate with any on-chain system. They are standalone pieces of privacy engineering. What Buterin funded, based on what is publicly documented, is simply the development of two messaging systems built around stronger defaults.

That narrow scope is what makes the donation interesting, because these two projects approach privacy from angles that most mainstream apps avoid: routing design and identity design.

The two apps that actually received funding

Session: a metadata-hardened routing system built around onion paths and pseudonymous keys

The Session whitepaper outlines a messaging network structured around public-key identities and a relay system designed to obscure the relationship between sender and recipient. Every user is represented by a keypair rather than a phone number or email address, and every message travels through a multi-hop onion-routing path that splits awareness across several nodes so that no single relay can observe both ends of a conversation.

To reduce exposure further, messages are stored among decentralized clusters of nodes known as “swarms,” which hold encrypted messages temporarily so users do not have to be online at the same time. Swarms store ciphertext without knowing what it contains, and the routing layer intentionally fragments the information available to each relay.

The network also incorporates a staking requirement for node operators, a Sybil-resistance measure that raises the cost of creating large fleets of malicious relays. The protocol described in the whitepaper emphasizes metadata as a first-order privacy risk, framing its routing and storage choices around limiting what intermediaries can learn. The effect is a system where communication leaves a significantly smaller observable footprint than conventional centralized messaging, even when content encryption is taken for granted.

SimpleX: a messaging model that avoids user identifiers entirely

SimpleX takes a different approach, documented in its protocol specification: instead of trying to hide metadata behind complex routing, it minimizes metadata by eliminating persistent user identifiers altogether. The network doesn’t assign usernames, numbers, or any form of stable ID. Users connect through one-time invitations or QR codes, and each relationship is handled as its own cryptographic channel with unique keys, isolated from all others.

Messages are relayed through SimpleX servers that act as transport mechanisms rather than identity hubs. Servers see packets but lack any information that links them to a user or conversation graph. All state (contacts, channels, and message history) is stored locally on the user’s device. Relationship discovery happens between endpoints, not on a server.

Because the protocol has no global notion of identity, the usual metadata surfaces evaporate. There is nothing for a server to correlate, nothing to harvest, and nothing that reveals the structure of a user’s social network. Where Session builds a hardened routing pipeline, SimpleX creates a communication model where the network has almost nothing to observe in the first place.

Together, these designs represent two interpretations of privacy engineering grounded in the specifics of each protocol rather than in marketing slogans.

Why this grant matters, even with its limited scope

The size of the donation is far smaller than most funding rounds in crypto, but the signal it sends is clearer than many larger initiatives. Communication tools occupy a strange position in digital infrastructure: everyone relies on them, yet most applications treat privacy as a layer that can be added later, rather than a property that must be engineered from the foundation upward. Session’s routing design and SimpleX’s identifier-free model both start from the opposite end of the spectrum.

Ethereum’s ecosystem has spent years wrestling with questions around privacy, scalability, and user experience, but blockchains are inherently poor at protecting communication patterns. The default behavior of global broadcast doesn’t translate well into private conversations, nor is it meant to. Messaging systems built for privacy have to design around a different set of threats, which is exactly what these two projects do.

By directing funds toward these two projects, Buterin is acknowledging that private communication is a prerequisite for a healthier internet, even if that communication happens entirely outside Ethereum. Nothing in the whitepapers or repositories suggests integration with wallets, smart contracts, or decentralized applications: the protocols stand alone. But privacy tools don’t need to be blockchain-native to matter to a blockchain ecosystem, because users who interact with on-chain systems still live most of their digital lives off-chain.

The donation arrives during a quieter phase of the market, when the absence of hype makes it easier to see which parts of digital infrastructure deserve attention. These apps are open-source, rely on distributed volunteer or community-run infrastructure, and benefit directly from marginal increases in funding, which makes a relatively small grant meaningful.

Privacy as an architectural starting point

Vitalik Buterin’s 256 ETH donation doesn’t outline the future of Ethereum, and it’s not a roadmap for on-chain privacy. What it does is highlight two systems that take privacy seriously at the protocol level, each addressing a different aspect of the metadata problem that dominates modern communication. Session focuses on reducing what routing nodes can infer, while SimpleX avoids building identifiers that can be inferred in the first place.

These approaches are grounded in their respective whitepapers and stand as concrete examples of what privacy engineering looks like when it begins at the base layer rather than as an optional feature. If the future of the internet requires stronger guarantees about who sees what, and when, these are the kinds of systems that will need support, even if they never touch a blockchain.

Mentioned in this article