Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has quietly redirected some of the growing on-chain privacy activity to the encrypted messaging space, donating a total of 256 ETH to SimpleX Chat and Session via the Railgun privacy protocol.
On-chain analytics firm Arkham was the first to announce the move, noting, “VITALIK JUST SENT $2.9M ETH TO RAILGUN. Vitalik holds over $700M ETH and just sent $2.9M to Railgun. What is he cooking?”
VITALIK just sent $2.9 million. $ETH With railgun
Vitalik holds over $700 million in ETH and just sent $2.9 million to Railgun.
What is he cooking? pic.twitter.com/2HvDFRDqi2
— Arkham (@arkham) November 26, 2025
Buterin supports SimpleX and Session
Soon after, Buterin saw donations from his Vitalik.eth account and explicitly framed them as a bet on the next frontier in privacy: permissionless and metadata-enhanced messaging. “Encrypted messaging like @signalapp is critical to protecting your digital privacy,” he wrote. “Two important next steps for this space are (i) unauthorized account creation and (ii) metadata privacy.” He then named Session and SimpleX “two messaging apps pushing this direction.”
Buterin stated that he “donated 128 ETH to each project” and provided an official website for anyone who wanted to “follow up” and then transitioned from philanthropy to adoption. “And actually download and use it!”
Transactions for SimpleX and Session were executed through Railgun, Ethereum's zero-knowledge privacy system that obfuscates sender, recipient, token type, and amount when interacting with smart contracts and DeFi protocols.
Buterin has used Railgun and other privacy systems repeatedly over the past two years, but he often explains that these transfers typically represent “some donation to a charity, non-profit or other project,” rather than a personal cash payment. Modern patterns fit this description. The funds will go to Railgun and then to privacy-centric infrastructure and applications, this time in the messaging domain.
In his post, Buterin positioned encrypted messaging as an important layer in a broader privacy stack alongside financial anonymity. He explicitly links the importance of Signal-style end-to-end encryption to new requirements beyond content secrecy: “unauthorized account creation” and “metadata privacy.” The first is to eliminate reliance on centralized real-world identifiers, such as phone numbers or email addresses, to create accounts. The second targets the less visible but equally revealing exhaustion of digital communication: who talks to whom, when and where.
Why Ethereum Founders Support Both Projects
Both SimpleX and Session are trying to solve these problems in ways that depart significantly from the mainstream model of phone number-based, cloud-synchronized messengers. SimpleX's own documentation emphasizes “complete privacy of your identity, profile, contacts and metadata” and that the platform has “no identifiers assigned to users, not even random numbers.”
Instead, users establish connections through QR codes or links, and communication routing is designed so that the service itself cannot reconstruct the social graph. Originally forked from Signal but rebuilt around onion routing and decentralized service nodes, Session is pushing a similar path, with no phone numbers, Tor-like network-level obfuscation, and attention to minimizing metadata.
Buterin made it clear that his support was not an argument that these apps were finished products. “None of them are perfect software, and there are ways to achieve a truly optimal user experience and security,” he warned. He then outlined the key engineering issues that still need to be addressed if “strong metadata privacy” is to coexist with the convenience that users now expect from mainstream messengers.
“Strong metadata privacy requires decentralization, but decentralization is difficult. Users expecting multi-device support makes everything more difficult,” he wrote. He also flagged Sybil and denial-of-service resistance as still open design spaces. Developers must strengthen “both the message routing network and the user side (without forcing phone number dependency).”
The latest donation also highlights how Buterin is increasingly using his personal assets to move the ecosystem toward specific priorities, including privacy-preserving DeFi, open source infrastructure, and now metadata-resistant communications tools. In this case, he explicitly calls for more attention from developers: “These issues need more attention. I wish the best of luck to all teams working to solve this important problem.”
At press time, Ethereum (ETH) was trading at $3,007.
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