Vitalik Buterin admits that Ethereum has “slipped” in the last 10 years

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, declared 2026 as the year in which the blockchain will take back its “cyberpunk” origin.

On January 16, Buterin unveiled a technology roadmap aimed at reversing what he described as a decade of “regression” in central regulation.

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How Ethereum plans to fix its compromises

I confess Co-founder of Ethereum The network’s search for mainstream scalability It damaged its fundamental promise of self-sovereignty.

2026 is the year we regain lost ground in terms of self-sovereignty and trust.

Some of what this means practically:

Full nodes: thanks to ZK-EVM and BAL, it will again be easier to run a node locally and check the Ethereum chain on your own computer.

– vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) January 16, 2026

According to him, the current ecosystem leaves users dangerously dependent on centralized infrastructure to interact with records. This trust is centered on trusted servers and remote procedure calls, or RPCs.

This structure forces users to trust third-party data providers instead of verifying the chain themselves.

To break this dependency, the 2026 Roadmap prioritizes implementation Helios machines and zero-knowledge Ethereum virtual machines (ZK-EVM).

These technologies aim to democratize the “full node” experience, allowing standard consumer devices to verify incoming data using bridging and local verification (BAL).

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By moving verification to the edge, Ethereum aims to eliminate the need to blindly trust centralized gateways like Infura or Alchemy.

Advance the roadmap Even aggressive “privacy user experience” features. That could put the network at odds with data-hungry analytics firms.

Therefore, Buterin proposed the combination of unobservable random access memory (ORAM) and private information retrieval (PIR). These cryptographic protocols allow wallets to request data from the network without revealing specific access patterns, blinding RPC providers to user activity.

This step is to prevent user behavior data from being “sold” to third parties.

On the security front, the network will unify social recovery wallets and time locks. These tools aim to make refunds intuitive without going back to central custodians or cloud clones that can be “spinned by Google” or other giant technology companies.

In addition, Ethereum will enhance the user interface It uses decentralized storage protocols such as IPFS. This reduces the risk of the introduction of the interface that can prevent users from entering their goods.

While he warned that these improvements might not happen immediately with the next version, Agenda 2026 represents A fundamental restructuring of how the world’s second largest blockchain manages trust.

“It will be a long road. We will not have everything we want in the next Kohco release, or the next hard release, or the next hard release. But it will make Ethereum an ecosystem worthy of not only its current place in the universe, but a much bigger place,” he said.