Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said in a post on X on July 17 that 2026 will be the year Ethereum reclaims self-sovereignty and trustlessness. His message focused on a broad concern: over the past decade, parts of the ecosystem have become easier to use, but also more dependent on centralized infrastructure.
Full-node verification and RPC privacy move to the front
Buterin said advances such as ZK-EVM and BAL could make local verification of Ethereum data on personal computers more practical again. In his view, users should be able to run their own full nodes more easily instead of relying entirely on outside providers.
He also pointed to Helios as an example of why users should not blindly trust data returned by remote RPC services. On privacy, he mentioned ORAM and PIR as technologies that could reduce the amount of information exposed when users query RPC endpoints, limiting the risk that activity patterns tied to decentralized application usage are collected and sold to third parties.
Wallet design and private payments are part of the shift
On wallet security, Buterin highlighted social recovery wallets and timelocks. The goal is to keep users from losing all assets immediately if a seed phrase is lost or compromised online or offline, without pushing them into systems controlled by large technology companies. He framed this as a middle path between full personal responsibility and full third-party dependence.
He also argued for better “privacy UX,” where private payments feel as simple to use as public ones. At the transaction propagation layer, he cited ERC-4337 alt-mempools as well as future native account abstraction, or AA, and FOCIL, saying these mechanisms could help private transactions remain censorship-resistant without depending on the current public broadcaster structure.
Buterin says Ethereum has regressed in key areas
Buterin wrote that Ethereum has seen “clear regression” across several important fronts over the last ten years. Running nodes used to be easier. Now it is harder. dApp interfaces, once closer to static pages, have turned into more complex sites that depend on multiple servers and may send user data to several outside parties.
He also criticized the wallet stack, saying users previously had more freedom to choose RPC endpoints or connect to self-run nodes, while many wallets now route traffic by default to a small group of providers. That concentrates on-chain behavior and identity-linked information in fewer hands. He added that block-building has also become more centralized, giving a smaller set of builders more control over whether transactions make it on-chain.
2026 is framed as the start of a course correction
Looking ahead, Buterin said the Ethereum community should begin stepping away in 2026 from value tradeoffs made in the name of mainstream adoption. He acknowledged the shift will not be completed in a single Kohaku upgrade or a few hard forks. Still, he said Ethereum should move closer to the original idea behind the “world computer”: no central controller and no single point of failure.
The post was read as both a technical roadmap signal and a public re-examination of the ecosystem’s growing centralization trend.