Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin declared Friday that 2026 will mark the year Ethereum reverses a decade of "backsliding" in self-sovereignty and trustlessness that occurred while pursuing mainstream adoption.
"Every compromise of values that Ethereum has made up to this point - every moment where you might have been thinking, is it really worth diluting ourselves so much in the name of mainstream adoption - we are making that compromise no longer," Buterin wrote in an X post.
The declaration signals a renewed focus on privacy, decentralization and user autonomy across Ethereum's development roadmap after years of gradual centralization through reliance on intermediary services.
What Went Wrong
Buterin acknowledged that nodes became harder to run, decentralized applications evolved into data-leaking behemoths, and wallets increasingly routed information through centralized Remote Procedure Call providers rather than allowing users to verify data locally.
Block building also became increasingly concentrated among a small number of operators, weakening Ethereum's censorship resistance and putting transaction inclusion under centralized control.
The lightweight Helios client enables users to verify blockchain data locally without running full nodes, while cryptographic techniques like Oblivious RAM and Private Information Retrieval prevent surveillance when accessing decentralized applications.
Technical Solutions Underway
Zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine implementations and blob-anchored logs will simplify local node operation, according to Buterin's roadmap, while upcoming upgrades target seamless private payments matching public transaction user experience.
The Ethereum Foundation launched the Kohaku wallet framework in late 2025 as an open-source privacy toolkit, alongside refocusing its 47-member Privacy Cluster on making confidentiality a first-class network property.
Social recovery wallets gained momentum following EIP-7702's introduction in Ethereum's Pectra upgrade last year, after Buterin advocated for such solutions since at least 2021 to protect users who lose seed phrases without introducing corporate backdoors.
Network improvement proposals including ERC-4337 for account abstraction and FOCIL for censorship resistance will roll out through upcoming hard forks like Glamsterdam, though Buterin cautioned the transformation "will be a long road" extending beyond multiple protocol upgrades.