Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has quietly redirected some of his growing on-chain privacy business into the crypto messaging space, donating a total of 256 ETH to SimpleX Chat and Session via privacy protocol Railgun.
Analytics firm Onchain Arkham first reported the move, noting “VITALIK JUST SENT $2.9 million worth of ETH to RAILGUN. Vitalik holds over $700 MILLION worth of ETH and just sent $2.9 million worth of ETH to Railgun. What is he cooking?”
VITALIK JUST SENT $2.9M $ETH AT RAIGUN
Vitalik holds over $700 MILLION worth of 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
Shortly after, Buterin confirmed the donations from his vitalik.eth account and explicitly presented them as a bet on the next frontier of privacy: permissionless, metadata-enhanced messaging. “Encrypted messages, like @signalapp, are essential to preserving our digital privacy,” he wrote. “The next two important steps for the space are (i) permissionless account creation and (ii) metadata privacy.” He then named Session and SimpleX as “two messaging apps moving these directions forward.”
Buterin clarified that he “donated 128 ETH to each project”, providing their official websites to anyone who wanted to “follow”, and then moved from philanthropy to adoption: “But also, download them and use them!
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.
Although Buterin has used Railgun and other privacy systems several times over the past two years, he has often explained that such transfers generally represent “a donation to a charitable, non-profit or other project”, rather than personal cash withdrawals. The latest model fits this narrative: funds flow to Railgun, then to privacy-focused infrastructure and applications, this time in the messaging space.
In his article, Buterin positions encrypted messengers as a crucial layer in the broader framework of privacy, alongside financial anonymity. It explicitly links the importance of Signal-style end-to-end encryption to new requirements that go beyond content secrecy: “authorization-free account creation” and “metadata confidentiality.” The first is to remove the need for centralized, real-world identifiers, such as phone numbers or email addresses, to create an account. The second targets the much less visible but equally revealing exhaustion of digital communication: who speaks to whom, when and from where.
Why the founder of Ethereum supports both projects
SimpleX and Session attempt to solve these problems in a way that deviates sharply from the traditional model of phone number-based, cloud-synced messaging. SimpleX’s own documentation emphasizes “complete confidentiality of your identity, profile, contacts, and metadata,” emphasizing that the platform “has no identifiers assigned to users – not even random numbers.”
Instead, users make connections through QR codes or links, and the routing of communications is designed in such a way that the service itself cannot reconstruct the social graph. Session, originally derived from Signal but rebuilt around onion routing and decentralized service nodes, pushes a similar line: no phone numbers, Tor-like network-level obfuscation, and attention to metadata minimization.
Buterin is clear that his support does not mean these apps are already finished products. “Neither is perfect software, they still have a way to go to achieve truly optimal user experience and security,” he cautioned. He then outlined the key engineering issues that still need to be resolved if “strong metadata privacy” is to coexist with the kind of convenience users now expect from consumer messaging.
“Strong metadata privacy requires decentralization, decentralization is hard, users expecting multi-device support makes everything harder,” he wrote. He also pointed to Sybil and denial-of-service resistance as a still open design space: developers need to harden “both in the message routing network and on the user side (without forcing phone number dependency).”
The latest donations also highlight how Buterin is increasingly using his personal holdings to push the ecosystem toward specific priorities: 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 good luck to all teams working on these important issues.”
At press time, Ethereum (ETH) was trading at $3,007.
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