Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin rang in 2026 by changing his
“Welcome to 2026! Milady is back,” Buterin wrote, before reviewing what he described as Ethereum’s progress for 2025: higher gas limits, more blob counts, better node software quality, and zkEVMs hitting major performance milestones. He also argued that “with zkEVM and PeerDAS, Ethereum has taken the biggest step forward to become a fundamentally new and more powerful type of blockchain.”
Ethereum must deliver the world computer
But the pole’s center of gravity was no victory lap. It was a warning that the network is still falling short of its own stated goals and that the goal is not to continue the narrative currently garnering attention.
Buterin drew a clear line between Ethereum’s long-term mission and the trend-driven incentives that often dominate crypto cycles. “Ethereum needs to do more to achieve its own stated goals,” he wrote. “It’s not about ‘winning the next meta,’ whether it’s token dollars or political memecoins, or arbitrarily convincing people to help us fill block space to re-ultrasound ETH, but the mission: building the world computer that serves as the central infrastructure for a freer, more open Internet.”
From there, he offered a description of what “world computer” should mean in practice: decentralized applications that cannot be changed or shut down silently, and that remain usable even when the businesses and infrastructure most users take for granted fail.
“We build decentralized applications. Applications that work without fraud, censorship, or third-party interference,” he wrote. “Apps that pass exit testing: They continue to work even if the original developers disappear. Apps where if you’re a user, you don’t even notice if Cloudflare goes down – or even if all of Cloudflare gets hacked by North Korea.”
Buterin extended this same set of expectations beyond finance, explicitly verifying identity, governance, and “any other civilizational infrastructure that people want to build,” and he emphasized privacy as an essential property rather than an advantage.
A notable thread of the article is that Buterin refuses to consider large-scale usability and decentralization as a trade-off that Ethereum can jump on. “To achieve this, it must be (i) usable and usable at scale, and (ii) truly decentralized,” he wrote, asserting that these requirements apply to both the base layer, “including the software we use to run and communicate with the blockchain” and the application layer.
This framework implicitly puts pressure on multiple stakeholders at once: core protocol work, client diversity and quality, infrastructure that is not centralized around a few providers, and dapp architectures that can survive developer abandonment while still meeting user expectations.
Buterin concluded on a note of determination rather than details, saying that Ethereum has “powerful tools” but needs to apply them more aggressively. “All of these parts need to be improved – they are already improved, but they need to be improved further,” he wrote. “Fortunately, we have powerful tools, but we must apply them, and we will.”
At press time, ETH was trading at $3,030.
Featured image from YouTube, chart from TradingView.com
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