Vitalik Buterin Admits Ethereum Has “Regressed” Over the Past Decade — Here’s How He Plans to Fix It
Jakarta, Pintu News – Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has set 2026 as the year that blockchain will return to its “cypherpunk” roots.
On January 16, Buterin introduced a technical roadmap designed to reverse what he called a decade-long setback in decentralization.
How Ethereum Plans to Fix Its Compromise
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin admitted that the network’s efforts to achieve mainstream scalability have come at the expense of its basic promise: user sovereignty.
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According to Buterin, the current Ethereum ecosystem makes users too dependent on centralized infrastructure to interact with the ledger. This reliance centers on trusted servers and Remote Procedure Calls (RPC).
This kind of architecture forces users to trust third-party data providers, instead of independently verifying the blockchain.
To address this dependency, the 2026 roadmap prioritizes the launch of Helios and Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines (ZK-EVMs).
These technologies aim to democratize the “full node” experience, allowing ordinary consumer hardware to verify incoming data through Bridges and Local Verification .
By shifting the verification process to the edge, Ethereum wants to eliminate the need for users to blindly trust centralized gateways like Infura or Alchemy.
The roadmap also introduces aggressive “privacy UX” features that could potentially conflict with data-hungry analytics companies.
As a solution, Buterin proposed the integration of Oblivious RAM (ORAM) and Private Information Retrieval (PIR) technologies. These cryptographic protocols allow wallets to request data from the network without revealing specific access patterns, so RPC providers cannot track user activity.
This measure is designed to prevent the “sale” of user behavior data to third parties.
Upcoming Ethereum Upgrades
In terms of security, the Ethereum network will standardize the use of social recovery wallets and time locks. These tools aim to make it easier to recover funds without having to rely on centralized custodians or cloud backups that are vulnerable to being compromised by Google or other tech giants.
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In addition, Ethereum will also strengthen the user interface by utilizing decentralized storage protocols such as IPFS. This will reduce the risk of hijacked interfaces, which can lock users’ access to their assets.
While Buterin cautioned that these improvements won’t come in the next release directly, the 2026 agenda represents a fundamental overhaul to the way the world’s second-largest blockchain handles trust.
“It will take a long time. We won’t get everything we want in the next Kohaku release, or the hard fork after that. But this will make Ethereum an ecosystem that is not only worthy of its current position in the world, but much more than that,” he said.
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Reference:
- BeInCrypto. Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum Reset 2026. Accessed on January 19, 2026
