Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin released a comprehensive statement outlining his 2026 roadmap and goal of returning to the core values of the Ethereum ecosystem.
Buterin described 2026 as “the year in which lost ground is regained in terms of self-sovereignty and trustless structures.”
According to Buterin, Ethereum will return to a structure that allows users to participate more directly and independently in the network. He argued that technologies such as ZK-EVM and BAL will make it easier to run full nodes again, allowing individual users to once again validate the Ethereum chain on their own computers. He said this approach would be one of the most fundamental steps toward increasing network decentralization.
The statement pointed out that we are entering an era where blind trust in RPC services is being questioned. Buterin said solutions like Helios allow users to directly verify the data they receive, and ORAM and PIR technologies allow them to hide what data is being requested from central services. This aims to prevent user behavioral data from being sold to third parties while accessing central applications.
On the wallet side, social recovery and time locking mechanisms will be prominent. Buterin said these structures both reduce the risk of seed phrase loss and prevent user funds from being indirectly controlled by large technology companies or centralized services. He also said the privacy experience will be improved, allowing private payments to be processed with the same user experience as general payments.
Buterin also acknowledged that the Ethereum ecosystem has experienced major setbacks in some areas over the past decade. These criticisms include that running full nodes becomes increasingly difficult, that dApps become complex structures that leak data to large numbers of servers, that wallets direct user data to centralized infrastructure, and that block production becomes increasingly under the control of a smaller number of actors. Buterin asserted that this trend will be reversed by 2026, “undoing all the value compromises that Ethereum made for mainstream adoption.”
Buterin acknowledged that the process will be long, but said the transformation cannot be completed with a single update or hard fork. However, he argued that the steps to be taken will make Ethereum not only worthy of its current position, but also a larger ecosystem. He concluded his statement with a quote that sums up Ethereum’s philosophy: “There is no central master of the world’s computers. There is no single point of failure. There is only love.”
*This is not investment advice.
