Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has quietly redirected some of his growing on-chain privacy activity to the encrypted messaging space, donating a total of 256 ETH to SimpleX chats and sessions via the Railgun privacy protocol.
On-chain analytics firm Arkham first flagged the move, pointing out that “VITALIK just transferred $2.9 million in ETH to RAILGUN. Vitalik holds over $700 million in ETH and just transferred $2.9 million to Railgun. What is he cooking?”
VITALIK transferred $2.9 million ETH to Railgun
Vitalik holds over $700 million in ETH and just transferred $2.9 million to Railgun.
What is 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 bet on the next frontier of privacy: permissionless, metadata-enriched messaging. “Encrypted messaging like @signalapp is critical to protecting your digital privacy,” he wrote. “The next two important steps in this space are (i) non-privileged account creation and (ii) metadata privacy,” he said, citing Session and SimpleX as “two messaging apps that are pushing in these directions.”
Buterin said he has “donated 128 ETH to each project” and provided his official website to those who wish to “follow” him, pivoting from philanthropy to recruitment. “But please actually download and use it!”
Transactions to SimpleX and Session were executed via Railgun, a zero-knowledge privacy system on Ethereum that hides the sender, recipient, token type and amount when interacting with smart contracts and DeFi protocols.
Buterin, who has repeatedly used Railgun and other privacy-preserving systems over the past two years, often explains that such transfers typically mean “a donation of a portion to a charity, nonprofit, or other project,” rather than a personal outflow of cash. The latest pattern fits that story. Funds are sent to Railgun and then to privacy-focused infrastructure and applications, this time to the messaging domain.
In his post, Buterin positions encrypted messengers as an important layer of a broader privacy stack, along with financial anonymity. He clearly links the importance of Signal-style end-to-end encryption to new requirements that go beyond content confidentiality: “permissionless account creation” and “metadata privacy.” The first is to eliminate reliance on centralized real-world identifiers such as phone numbers and email addresses to create accounts. The second targets the far less obvious but equally obvious depletion of digital communication: who speaks to whom, when, and from where.
Why Ethereum founders support both projects
Both SimpleX and Session seek to address these issues in ways that are significantly different from the mainstream model of phone number-based cloud-synced messengers. SimpleX’s own documentation emphasizes “complete privacy of users’ identities, profiles, contacts, and metadata,” and that the platform has “no identifiers assigned to users, not even random numbers.”
Instead, users establish a connection via a QR code or link, and communication routing is designed so that the service itself cannot reconstruct the social graph. Session originally forked from Signal, but has been rebuilt around onion routing and decentralized service nodes, pushing a similar path: no phone numbers, Tor-like network-level obfuscation, and an emphasis on minimizing metadata.
Buterin makes it clear that his endorsement is not a claim that these apps are already finished products. “Neither software is perfect, and we still have a ways to go to achieve truly optimal user experience and security,” he cautioned. We then outlined the core engineering issues that still need to be resolved in order for “strong metadata privacy” to coexist with the kind of convenience that users now expect from mainstream messengers.
“Strong metadata privacy requires decentralization, but decentralization is difficult, and everything is made harder when users expect multi-device support,” he wrote. He also cautioned that resistance to Sybil and denial-of-service attacks is still an open design area, and said developers need to strengthen it “both on the message routing network and on the user side (without forcing a reliance on phone numbers).”
The latest donation also underscores how Buterin is increasingly using his personal holdings to drive the ecosystem toward specific priorities: privacy-preserving DeFi, open source infrastructure, and now metadata-tolerant communication tools. In this case, he makes a clear call for greater caution from developers. “These issues need more attention, and we wish all the teams working on these important issues the best of luck.”
At the time of writing, Ethereum (ETH) was trading at $3,007.
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