Vitalik Buterin wants to end Ethereum value additions
Crypto journalist
Anas Hasan
Crypto journalist
Share
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin They declared 2026 to be the year Ethereum regains lost ground on sovereignty and trustlessness, calling for the network to end its compromises in pursuit of universal adoption.
In a lengthy post on X on Friday, Buterin outlined profound technical and philosophical changes aimed at reversing the decades-old architecture of nodes, wallets, apps and blockchain.
“2026 is the year we will regain lost ground in terms of self-sovereignty and distrust,” Buterin wrote.
The manifesto marks Ethereum's sharpest pivot away from convenience-driven design choices that dilute core values for the network's long-term legitimacy and expanded role in global infrastructure.
The technical road map targets cross access and privacy infrastructure
Buterin's plan centers on re-implementing full node functionality using zero-knowledge Ethereum virtual machines and access restrictions, which has taken years of increasing hardware requirements off personal computers.
“Full Nodes: Thanks to ZK-EVM and BAL, it will be easy again to run a node locally and verify the Ethereum chain on your own computer,” he said.
The roadmap prioritizes Helios to “verify the data it receives from RPCs instead of blindly trusting them” with non-forgotten RAM and private data retrieval protocols that allow users to “request data from RPCs without specifying which data they are requesting, so that third parties can access DAPs without selling ten times your access patterns.”
Social recovery wallets with a time lock provide “wallets where if you misplace your pedigree or if an online or offline attacker takes your pedigree, you won't lose all your funds, and they won't have all your funds locked back by Google.”
Privacy features will be integrated into the wallet interface to “make private payments from your wallet with the same user experience for public payments.”
Application interfaces migrate to onchain hosting via IPFS “Relying on trusted servers that lock us down if your assets go offline, and give you a UI that steals your money if they get hacked for even a millisecond.
Buterin warned that “in the last ten years we have seen a serious backsliding in Ethereum”, nodes “from easy to run to a difficult task” and dapps “turned from static pages to complex behemoths with all your data on dozens of servers.”
Beyond immediate protocol improvements, a long-term view
Buterin acknowledged that change will not happen quickly, but emphasized its importance.
“All the compromises Ethereum has made up to this point — whenever you think it's worth exhausting ourselves in the name of mainstream adoption — we're making that compromise from now on,” he said.
“It's going to be a long road. We won't get everything we want in the next Kohaku release, or the next hard fork, or the next hard fork. But it will make Ethereum not only its current place in the universe, but an ecosystem that deserves much more,” wrote Buterin.
“There is no centralized ruler in the computer world, no single point of failure, only love,” he concluded.
The manifesto comes as Ethereum makes breakthroughs in blockchain trilemma with ZKEVMs and PeerDAS technology.
The network underwent a second blob parameter-only hard fork, increasing the blob limit from 15 to 21 and expanding data capacity to support rollup scaling while maintaining lower base-layer fees.
Network growth has accelerated, with new active addresses climbing from more than 4 million to nearly 8 million in the past month and daily transactions hitting a record 2.8 million, up nearly 125 percent from year-ago levels.
Glassnode's data shows that month-over-month retention nearly doubles in the new user cohort, indicating that new participants stay engaged rather than churn after the first interaction.
Trending news, recommended popular crypto topics, price predictions
