In 2026, Ethereum will reclaim its lost ground in self-governance and trustlessness.
In 2026, Ethereum will reclaim its lost ground in self-governance and trustlessness, according to project co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
“All the compromises on values that Ethereum has made so far — every moment when you might think, ‘Is it worth diluting our values so much for mass adoption?’ — we will no longer make these concessions,” he wrote.
To change the trend, Buterin outlined tasks for improvement in private payments, lowering the barrier to running a full node, and enabling applications that do not rely on centralized servers.
He also emphasized the importance of user control over personal data on the blockchain and the need to improve the social recovery process, which protects funds in case of seed phrase loss or theft.
“In many of these areas over the past ten years, we have seen significant regression in Ethereum’s development. Running nodes has gone from simple to complex. Decentralized applications have turned from static pages into cumbersome giants that send all your data to a dozen servers,” Buterin acknowledged.
Some of the identified issues will be addressed by the launch of the Kohaku tool stack and the upcoming Glamsterdam hard fork.
