The core values of the Ethereum ecosystem such as decentralization, privacy and sovereignty have been sacrificed in the push for mainstream adoption and this trend must stop now, said Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
“2026 is the year we regain lost ground in terms of sovereignty and lack of trust” – Buterin sent to X on Friday:
“In 2026, not anymore. Every value trade-off that Ethereum has made up to this point – every point where you might have wondered whether it was really worth diluting so much in the name of mainstream adoption – we are no longer making that trade-off.
To reverse this trend, Buterin wants to improve private payments and lower the barrier to entry for users so they can run full nodes and decentralized applications that don’t run on centralized servers.
It also wants users to be able to more easily take control of their onchain data and see improved social recovery wallets that protect funds in the event of loss or extraction of seed phrases by an attacker.
“In many of these areas, we have seen a major pullback in Ethereum over the last ten years,” Buterin said. “Nodes have gone from being easy to run to hard to run. Dapps have gone from being static sites to being complicated behemoths that leak all your data to a dozen or so servers.”
Buterin said upcoming updates, including the Kohaku release and the Glamsterdam fork, are expected to address some of these issues.
“It’s going to be a long road […] But it will make Ethereum an ecosystem that deserves not only its current place in the universe, but a much larger one.”
Buterin wants Ethereum to be self-sustaining
Buterin said earlier this week that Ethereum must pass a “pass test,” meaning Ethereum will become self-sustaining without developer influence for decades to come.
“Being able to say, ‘The Ethereum protocol in its current form is cryptographically secure for a hundred years,’ is something we should strive for as soon as possible,” he said.
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Quantum resilience features, a more scalable architecture and a better blockchain model that resists centralization pressures are among the major improvements, Buterin said Ethereum must stand the test of time.
Buterin also wants more decentralized stablecoin innovation
Buterin also called for better decentralized stablecoins on Ethereum to truly give people independence from governments and the time-honored financial system.
He suggested a stablecoin that relies on a diversified basket of assets and currencies, rather than solely relying on one such as the US dollar, so its stability is not reliant on any one country.
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