Ethereum : Buterin reveals major upcoming reforms

Vitalik Buterin is an enigma. Sometimes a sunny visionary, sometimes a worried prophet, he oscillates between optimism and skepticism. The architect of Ethereum now seems aware that the original promise of the blockchain has faded, diluted in the quest for mass adoption. But true to his style, it is not about condemning: rather about correcting. In 2026, he claims, Ethereum must regain its purity, its roots, its philosophy of decentralized trust.

Ethereum facing its mirror: a wake-up call for the crypto industry

On X, Vitalik Buterin published a long message with an almost manifesto tone. He laments ten years of drift, where simplicity and original sovereignty were sacrificed on the altar of comfort. Ethereum nodes have become too complex to run, dApps too dependent on centralized servers, crypto wallets too tied to web giants.

Nodes have shifted from simple operation to complex operation. dApps have gone from simple static pages to massive giants disseminating all your data to a dozen servers.

But rather than stop at the observation, he calls for a gentle revolt.

According to him, 2026 will be the year of return to self-sovereignty and trustlessness, two founding pillars of Ethereum. Concrete technical solutions are already on the table: the ZK-EVM and the BAL protocol, intended to make nodes easy to run again. The Helios project will allow verifying data from RPCs without trusting third parties. And thanks to ORAM and PIR tools, access to dApps could be done without exposing users’ requests.

The vision is clear: Ethereum, the Linux of blockchain, must become an ecosystem that one can verify by oneself, permissionless and surveillance-free.

Buterin’s great mea culpa: rebuild Ethereum without masters or compromise

Beyond the technical aspect, it is a moral confession. Vitalik admits that the crypto industry has too quickly yielded to centralized logics: proprietary servers, dependence on Google, domination of a few block producers. In his tweet series, he promises a slow but firm reconstruction:

It will be a long road. We won’t get everything we want with the next Kohaku update, nor with the next hard fork, nor even the one after that. But it will make Ethereum an ecosystem worthy not only of the place it occupies today in the universe but of an even greater place.

This ambition relies on a strong concept: the “walkaway test.” Ethereum will have to survive without its founder, withstand upheavals, and guarantee cryptographic security for a century. He also wants to encourage the creation of truly decentralized stablecoins, backed by a basket of diverse assets and not by a single state, to offer monetary independence to the crypto-sphere.

One sentence from his manifesto condenses the spirit of this crusade: in this machine-world that is Ethereum, there is no central master, no single point of failure—only love, and a nod to the irony of history: “Milady”.

Key figures and landmarks to remember

• 2026: the year of “return to self-sovereignty”;
• 2 announced hard forks: Kohaku and Glamsterdam;
• 6 technical pillars: ZK-EVM, BAL, Helios, ORAM, PIR, ERC-4337;
• Long-term goal: a self-sustaining Ethereum for 100 years;
• New ambitions: multi-asset decentralized stablecoins.

Vitalik Buterin, sometimes poet, sometimes engineer, keeps the course. For 2027, he is betting on an innovation that could redefine the network: ZK-EVMs, capable of validating blocks faster, with more privacy and less centralization. A bold bet, but faithful to Ethereum’s original spirit: freedom through code.