Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says 2026 will be the year the network gets back to its roots.
In a long post on X on Friday, Buterin called for Ethereum to stop compromising on its core values—self-sovereignty, privacy, and trustlessness—in the name of mainstream adoption. After years of gradual centralization across nodes, wallets, apps, and infrastructure, he framed the moment as a turning point for Ethereum’s credibility and long-term role in the world.
“2026 is the year that we take back lost ground in terms of self-sovereignty and trustlessness,” Buterin wrote.
The message was blunt: Ethereum has spent too long choosing convenience over principle, and that trade-off is no longer acceptable.
Making Ethereum Usable Without Giving Up Control
At the heart of Buterin’s vision is a return to an Ethereum that ordinary users can actually verify and use without trusting large intermediaries.
He outlined plans to make running a full node practical again, pointing to advances like zero-knowledge EVMs and Block Access Limits that could dramatically lower hardware requirements. The goal is to reverse a trend that has quietly pushed verification out of reach for most people.
“Thanks to ZK-EVM and BAL, it will once again become easier to locally run a node and verify the Ethereum chain on your own computer,” he said.
The roadmap also tackles privacy head-on. Tools like Helios would allow users to verify data coming from RPC providers instead of blindly trusting them. Oblivious RAM and private information retrieval protocols would let people interact with dapps without revealing what they’re doing—or having that data quietly sold to third parties.
Wallets are also set for a rethink. Buterin described social-recovery wallets with timelocks that protect users from losing everything if they misplace a seed phrase or fall victim to an attack—without handing control over to big tech companies. Privacy features, he added, should be built directly into wallets, making private payments feel no different from public ones.
Fixing the App Layer
Ethereum applications, too, are in the spotlight. Buterin criticized how many dapps have evolved from simple, transparent tools into complex systems that depend on centralized servers and leak user data.
To counter that, he argued for more on-chain interfaces hosted via IPFS, reducing the risk of users being locked out of their assets or exposed to malicious UI changes if a server goes down—or gets hacked for even a moment.
Looking back, Buterin didn’t sugarcoat Ethereum’s trajectory.
“Over the last ten years we have seen serious backsliding,” he wrote, noting how nodes became harder to run and apps became bloated and invasive.
No More Half Measures
Buterin acknowledged that undoing years of compromises won’t happen overnight. But he was clear that the direction has changed.
“Every compromise of values that Ethereum has made up to this point… we are making that compromise no longer,” he said.
The shift won’t be completed in the next release or even the next few hard forks. But, in his view, it’s the only path toward an Ethereum that truly deserves its place as global infrastructure.
“In the world computer,” Buterin wrote, “there is no centralized overlord. There is no single point of failure. There is only love.”
Momentum Behind the Message
The manifesto arrives as Ethereum makes tangible progress on long-standing technical challenges. Advances in ZK-EVMs and PeerDAS are helping ease the blockchain trilemma, while the network’s second Blob Parameter-Only hard fork has increased blob capacity from 15 to 21—supporting rollup scaling without pushing up base-layer fees.
Usage is rising alongside the tech. New active addresses have jumped from just over 4 million to around 8 million in the past month, daily transactions have hit a record 2.8 million, and Glassnode data shows new users are sticking around at nearly double the previous rate.
For Buterin, those numbers matter—but only if Ethereum stays true to what made it worth building in the first place.
