Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin Releases Statement on the Future of ETH

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has released a comprehensive statement outlining his roadmap for 2026 and his goal of returning to the core values of the Ethereum ecosystem.

Buterin described 2026 as “the year when the ground lost in terms of self-sovereignty and trustless structures will be reclaimed.”

According to Buterin, in the coming period, Ethereum will regain a structure where users can participate in the network more directly and independently. He stated that technologies like ZK-EVM and BAL will make it easier to run full nodes again, arguing that it will become possible for individual users to verify the Ethereum chain on their own computers once more. This approach, he said, would be one of the most fundamental steps in strengthening the network’s decentralization.

The statement noted that we are entering a period where blind trust in RPC services will also be questioned. Buterin stated that solutions like Helios allow users to directly verify the data they receive, and that ORAM and PIR technologies make it possible to conceal which data is being requested from central services. This aims to prevent the sale of user behavioral data to third parties during access to central applications.

On the wallet side, social recovery and timelock mechanisms will be prominent. Buterin stated that 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 noted that 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 significant setbacks in some areas over the past decade. These criticisms included the increasing difficulty of running full nodes, dApps becoming complex structures that leak data to numerous servers, wallets directing user data to centralized infrastructures, and block production increasingly falling under the control of a small number of actors. Buterin argued that this trend will be reversed by 2026, stating, “We are undoing every value compromise Ethereum made for the sake of mainstream adoption.”

Acknowledging that the process will be a long one, Buterin stated that this 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 much larger ecosystem. He concluded his statement with these words summarizing Ethereum’s philosophy: “There is no central master in the world computer. There is no single point of failure. There is only love.”

*This is not investment advice.

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