Vitalik Buterin commits to reversing the "setback" on privacy and autonomy on Ethereum by 2026

Vitalik Buterin affirms that 2026 will be the year the Ethereum community begins to reverse the “regression” trend in personal sovereignty within the crypto space.

In a post on X early this morning, Buterin emphasized: “2026 will be the year we reclaim the lost value of personal sovereignty and trustlessness.” According to him, the goal is not only to enhance onchain privacy but also to make it easier for users to operate full nodes, use dApps, and control their personal data.

A key part of this effort is the Kohaku project implemented by the Ethereum Foundation, aimed at improving privacy right from the wallet layer. Buterin admits this will be a long journey and cannot be completed in a single release or a one-time hard fork. Nevertheless, he believes these steps will make Ethereum a worthy ecosystem not only for its current status but also for a much larger role in the future.

In fact, Ethereum developers have quietly laid the groundwork for these improvements over many years, with upcoming upgrades like Glamsterdam expected to realize many of the set goals.

Regarding user experience, an important priority is to popularize social recovery wallets and timelock mechanisms—wallets that help users avoid losing all assets just because they misplace their seed phrase. Buterin has supported this model since 2021, and last year, that vision began to take shape with the launch of EIP-7702 in the Pectra upgrade.

Alongside, he has also become a strong advocate for privacy, both at the individual level and across the entire network. “Privacy experiences need to reach a level where users can perform private transactions with no different feeling than public transactions,” Buterin wrote.

The Ethereum Foundation has restructured the “Privacy Cluster” and launched the Kohaku wallet framework to realize this goal. Other proposed improvements like ERC-4337 for account abstraction or FOCIL are also expected to strengthen the network’s resistance to censorship.

Buterin calls on users to access dApps through onchain interfaces combined with IPFS, instead of relying on centralized servers. According to him, the old model not only risks access disruptions but also opens the door to interface takeover attacks, which can lead to asset loss in the blink of an eye.

On data sovereignty, Buterin highly appreciates Helios—a lightweight client that allows users to interact with Ethereum in a trustless manner without running a full node. This tool helps users verify data received from RPC rather than accepting it blindly. Additionally, cryptographic techniques like Oblivious RAM (ORAM) and Private Information Retrieval (PIR) can limit data leaks when using dApps, preventing surveillance or censorship by intermediary RPC parties.

Looking back over the past decade, Buterin candidly admits that Ethereum has experienced many serious setbacks: nodes becoming increasingly difficult to operate, dApps becoming bulky and collecting user data, wallets shifting from flexible models to dependence on centralized RPCs, and block production processes becoming more centralized.

“From 2026 onward, that will no longer be the case,” Buterin affirms. “All compromises on value that Ethereum has accepted—every moment that makes us wonder whether to trade our identity for mass adoption—will be reversed.”

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