Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum will end privacy compromises and restore decentralization in 2026

Source: Yellow Original Title: Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum will end privacy compromises and restore decentralization in 2026

Original Link: Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated on Friday that 2026 will mark the year Ethereum reverses a decade of setbacks in self-sovereignty and trustlessness that occurred while pursuing mass adoption.

Every value commitment Ethereum has made so far, every moment you might have thought, is it really worth diluting ourselves so much in the name of mass adoption? We will no longer make that commitment.

The statement highlights a renewed focus on privacy, decentralization, and user autonomy throughout Ethereum’s development roadmap, after years of gradual centralization due to reliance on intermediary services.

What went wrong

Buterin acknowledged that running nodes has become more difficult, that decentralized applications have evolved into massive data leakages, and that wallets increasingly redirect information through centralized Remote Procedure Call providers instead of allowing users to verify data locally.

Block building has also become increasingly concentrated in a small number of operators, weakening Ethereum’s censorship resistance and placing transaction inclusion under centralized control.

The lightweight client Helios allows users to verify blockchain data locally without running full nodes, while cryptographic techniques like Oblivious RAM and Private Information Retrieval prevent surveillance when accessing decentralized applications.

Ongoing technical solutions

Implementations of zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine and blobs-anchored records will simplify local node operation, according to Buterin’s roadmap, while upcoming updates aim for seamless private payments that match the user experience of public transactions.

The Ethereum Foundation launched the Kohaku wallet framework in late 2025 as an open-source privacy toolkit, along with a re-focus of its 47-member Privacy Cluster to make confidentiality a first-class property of the network.

Social recovery wallets gained momentum after the introduction of EIP-7702 in Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade last year, following Buterin’s advocacy for such solutions at least since 2021 to protect users who lose their seed phrases without introducing corporate backdoors.

Network improvement proposals, including ERC-4337 for account abstraction and FOCIL for censorship resistance, will be implemented through upcoming hard forks like Glamsterdam, although Buterin warned that the transformation will be a long road extending beyond multiple protocol upgrades.