Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin predicts that 2026 will be the year the blockchain returns to its original "cypherpunk" spirit.
On January 16, 2024, Buterin announced a technical roadmap aimed at reversing what he called “a decade of regression” in decentralization.
How does Ethereum plan to overcome its limitations?
Ethereum's co-founder acknowledged that the network's pursuit of scalability to serve the masses had inadvertently undermined its core promise of user autonomy.
According to Buterin, the current ecosystem makes users overly dependent on centralized infrastructure when interacting with blockchain. This dependence is primarily related to the use of trusted servers and Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) protocols.
This architecture forces users to trust third-party data providers instead of verifying the chain themselves.
To change this, the roadmap to 2026 will prioritize the deployment of Helios and Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines (ZK-EVMs) .
These technologies aim to make the "full node" experience more widespread, enabling most mainstream devices to also check and validate data through Bridges and Local Verification (BAL).
By shifting the verification process to the end user, Ethereum aims to eliminate the need for blind trust in centralized gateways like Infura or Alchemy.
This roadmap also introduces strong “privacy UX” features, promoting user privacy, although this may lead to conflicts with data analytics companies.
Therefore, Buterin proposed integrating protocols such as Oblivious RAM (ORAM) and Private Information Retrieval (PIR). These protocols allow wallets to look up data without revealing browsing habits or history, thereby anonymizing user activity from RPC providers.
This solution aims to prevent user behavioral data from being sold to third parties.
In terms of security, the network will standardize wallet types with “social recovery” features and lock-up times. These tools will make asset recovery easier, eliminating the need for centralized custody services or cloud storage that are vulnerable to interference from large tech corporations like Google.
In addition, Ethereum will enhance the user interface by using decentralized storage protocols like IPFS, which helps limit the risk of interface hijacking and locking up users' assets.
Although he noted that these updates wouldn't be implemented immediately in the upcoming release, the plan for 2026 would be a major step forward, fundamentally changing how the world's second-largest blockchain manages trust .
“This will be a long road. We won’t get everything we want right away in the next Kohaku release, or subsequent upgrades. But these changes will help Ethereum not only live up to its current position but also expand Vai in the future,” he Chia .
