Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has named the year 2026 as the year when the blockchain returns to its "cypherpunk" roots.
On January 16, Buterin presented a technical roadmap. According to him, it aims to reverse a decade of "setbacks" in decentralization.
This is how Ethereum wants to resolve its compromises
The Ethereum co-founder admitted that the search for more scalability in the network has weakened the earlier promise of self-determination.
In his opinion, users are now far too reliant on centralized structures to work with the blockchain. This mainly refers to trusted servers and Remote Procedure Calls, or RPCs.
This architecture forces users to trust third parties with their data instead of verifying the chain themselves.
To reduce this dependency, the roadmap for 2026 primarily relies on the use of Helios and Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines (ZK-EVMs).
These technologies are meant to open the 'full-node' experience to everyone. With normal hardware, you can then check incoming data yourself thanks to bridges and local verification (BAL).
Through this new form of verification, Ethereum wants users to no longer have to trust central providers like Infura or Alchemy.
The roadmap also includes new privacy-UX features. These could lead to conflicts with analytics firms that collect a lot of user data.
For this, Buterin suggests incorporating Oblivious RAM (ORAM) and Private Information Retrieval (PIR). These cryptographic methods allow wallets to retrieve data from the network without revealing patterns. This way, RPC providers can no longer see what users are doing.
This is intended to prevent user behavior data from being simply sold to third parties.
On the topic of security, the network aims to introduce social-recovery wallets and time delays. This way, lost funds can be retrieved more easily without needing central custodians or cloud backups that could be abused by tech companies like Google.
Additionally, Ethereum aims to strengthen its user interfaces by using decentralized storage solutions like IPFS. This reduces the risk that manipulated interfaces lock users out of their assets.
Buterin warned that many improvements will not appear with the next update. Nevertheless, the plan for 2026 shows a significant restructuring of how the world's second-largest blockchain organizes trust.
“It will be a long road. We won't get everything we want with the next Kohaku release, the next hard fork, or the hard fork after that. But this makes Ethereum an ecosystem that not only deserves its place in the universe but a much larger one,” he said.
