Ethereum has not “lost”, but it has sometimes compromised. That is the quite direct message that Vitalik Buterin put back on the table on Friday 16 January 2026. He promises a year of reconquest: easier to verify the network yourself, easier to use dApps without trusting intermediaries, and easier to take back control of your data.
In brief
- •Vitalik Buterin states that 2026 will be the year when Ethereum fixes its compromises and returns to more sovereignty.
- •Goal: make full nodes and verification much more accessible, without depending on dominant infrastructures.
- •Another priority: dApps less “Web2”, with more native privacy and safer wallets thanks to social recovery.
More Accessible Nodes: Putting Verification Back at the Center
In his post, the central idea is clear. 2026 must “take back ground” on personal sovereignty and “trustlessness”. In other words: less dependence on a few node providers, fragile interfaces, and pipelines that observe everything. He also warns that the crypto project will be long, spread over several versions and hard forks.
The core of the matter is the ability to verify yourself. A “full node” becoming affordable again is not an engineering detail. It’s the difference between “I believe” and “I know”. The ETH crypto co-founder emphasizes that, in recent years, running a node has become more difficult. And this has shifted the power towards a few dominant infrastructures.
In the same logic, he highlights another path: light clients. They do not replace all uses of a full node, but they can make verification much lighter. Ethereum itself explains that light clients integrated into a wallet can verify data instead of trusting it via an RPC provider.
Less "Web2 Disguised" dApps, and Interfaces That Do Not Disappear
Second project: the dApps. Vitalik targets a sore point. Many dApps have become complex machines that leak data to a constellation of servers. And when the interface goes down, the user is sometimes stuck, even if their assets are onchain.
He therefore advocates a more “onchain” use of interfaces, with approaches like UI served via IPFS. The goal is not to look pretty. It is to avoid the scenario where an offline or compromised dApp becomes a perfect entry point for large-scale phishing. The promise is crypto that also resists common failures.
But there is another, quieter angle: request privacy. Even if your transactions are clean, your reads are not necessarily so. When you query the state of a contract via RPC, you leave traces. Vitalik mentions techniques like Oblivious RAM (ORAM) and Private Information Retrieval (PIR) to prevent intermediaries from deducing what you do on a dApp. It’s not magic, it’s a way to break surveillance “by metadata”.
Privacy and UX: Recoverable Wallets and the Return of Self-Sovereignty
The third axis is the one that speaks the most to the general public: privacy, but with real UX. Vitalik summarizes the ambition almost provocatively: to make private payments from your wallet with an experience comparable to public payments. Not an “expert” mode, not a path full of warnings, just normal use.
Sovereignty is not just hiding data. It is also not losing your funds due to human error. Vitalik talks again about social recovery wallets and timelocks, these mechanisms which avoid the drama of lost seed. On this point, the ecosystem is already advancing with account abstraction, notably ERC-4337, and the arrival of EIP-7702 in the Pectra upgrade, often described as a step towards more “intelligent” wallets.