Ethereum didn’t “lose,” but it compromised at times. This is the message, quite head-on, that Vitalik Buterin put back on the table on Friday January 16, 2026. He promises a year of recovery: easier to check the network yourself, easier to use dApps without trusting intermediaries, and easier to regain control of your data.
In brief
- Vitalik Buterin says 2026 will be the year Ethereum corrects its compromises and returns to more sovereignty.
- Objective: to make full nodes and verification much more accessible, without depending on dominant infrastructures.
- Another priority: less “Web2” dApps, with more native privacy and more secure wallets thanks to social recovery.
More accessible nodes, or how to put verification back at the center
In his post, the central idea is clear. 2026 must “regain ground” on personal sovereignty and “trustlessness”. In other words: less dependence on a few node providers, fragile interfaces, and pipes that observe everything. He also warns that the crypto project will be long, spread over several versions and hard forks.
The crux of the matter is the ability to check for yourself. A “full node” which becomes affordable again is not an engineering detail. This is the difference between “I believe” and “I know”. The co-founder of the ETH crypto insists that, in recent years, running a node has become more difficult. And it shifted power to a few dominant infrastructures.
In the same logic, he highlights another path: light clients. They don't replace all uses of a full node, but they can make verification much lighter. Ethereum itself explains that light clients integrated into a wallet can verify data instead of believing it via an RPC provider.
Less “Web2 in disguise” dApps, and interfaces that don’t disappear
Second project: dApps. Vitalik aims at an annoying point. Many dApps have become complex machines that leak data to a constellation of servers. And when the interface falls, the user is sometimes stuck, even if their assets are onchain.
It therefore pushes a more “onchain” use of interfaces, with approaches such as UI served via IPFS. The goal is not to look pretty. This is to avoid the scenario where an offline, or compromised, dApp becomes a perfect gateway for large-scale phishing. The promise is a crypto that is also resistant to ordinary failures.
But there is another, more discreet angle: the confidentiality of requests. Even if your transactions are clean, your readings may not be. When you query the state of a contract via RPC, you leave traces. Vitalik evokes techniques like Oblivious RAM (ORAM) and Private Information Retrieval (PIR) to prevent intermediaries from inferring what you are doing on a dApp. It's not magic, it's a way to break surveillance “by metadata”.
Privacy and UX: Kohaku, recoverable wallets, and return of “self-sovereignty”
The third axis is the one that speaks most to the general public: privacy, but with a real UX. Vitalik sums up the ambition almost provocatively: making private payments from your wallet with an experience comparable to public payments. Not an “expert” mode, not a route strewn with warnings, just normal use.
Sovereignty is not just about hiding data. It’s also about not losing your funds due to human error. Vitalik talks again about social recovery wallets and timelocks, these mechanisms which avoid the drama of the lost seed. On this point, the ecosystem is already moving forward with account abstraction, notably ERC-4337, and the arrival of EIP-7702 in the Pectra upgrade, often presented as a step towards more “intelligent” wallets.
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