Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has urged further research into zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), specifically advocating for a new metric known as the time ratio. This metric, comparing encrypted computation time to original computation time, offers more robust insight than simply measuring operations per second (N ops). It provides valuable insights into the tradeoffs involved when using cryptographic techniques rather than relying on trust. Buterin acknowledges the challenges of calculating this ratio, including the complexities of diverse operations between execution and proof-related issues such as SIMD/parallelization and memory access patterns. Despite these difficulties and inherent hardware dependence in the ratio, he believes it remains a valuable indicator for developers who can easily estimate encryption impact based on their knowledge of original computation time.