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Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, said that the core values of the Ethereum ecosystem of decentralization, privacy and self-sovereignty have been sacrificed in the pursuit of mainstream adoption and this trend must stop now.
“2026 is the year we regain what we lost in terms of self-sovereignty and lack of trust,” Buterin said to publish To X on Friday:
“In 2026, that’s no longer the case. Every value compromise that Ethereum has offered up to this point — at every moment you might have been thinking, is it really worth diluting ourselves so much in the name of mainstream adoption — we’re not offering that compromise anymore.”
To reverse this trend, Buterin wants to see private payments improved and the barrier to entry lowered for users Run full nodes And decentralized applications that do not run on central servers.
He also wants users to be able to more easily control their on-chain data and see improved social recovery wallets that protect funds when seed statements are lost or exfiltrated by an attacker.
“In many of these areas, over the past 10 years we have seen a serious decline in Ethereum,” Buterin said. “Nodes have gone from easy to operate to difficult to operate. DApps have gone from static pages to complex giants that leak all your data to dozens of servers.”
Buterin said the upcoming upgrades, including the Kohaku version and glamsterdam fork, It is expected to address some of these issues.
“It’s going to be a long road […] But it will make Ethereum an ecosystem worthy of not only its current place in the universe, but a much greater one.
Buterin wants Ethereum to be self-sustaining
Buterin said earlier this week that Ethereum needs to pass an “exit test,” ie Ethereum becomes self-sustaining Without developer influence for decades to come.
“Being able to say that the Ethereum protocol, as it is today, is cryptographically secure for a hundred years is something we should strive to get to as soon as possible,” he said.
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Quantum resistance attributes, More scalable architecture, A better block building model that resists centralization pressures was among the key improvements Buterin said Ethereum needed to stand the test of time.
Buterin also wants to create more decentralized stablecoins
Buterin also called for the best Decentralized stablecoins on Ethereum to give people true independence from governments and the traditional financial system.
He proposed a stable currency backed by a diverse basket of assets and currencies, rather than relying on just one, such as the US dollar, so its stability does not depend on a single country.
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