Ethereum’s 2026 Upgrades Improve Self-Sovereignty

• Vitalik Buterin says Ethereum will prioritize self-sovereignty, decentralization, and privacy through 2026 upgrades.
• New applications such as Kohaku, Helios, and social recovery wallets are meant to reinstate a sense of user control and decentralization.

Vitalik Buterin has called 2026 the year Ethereum will regain lost ground in decentralization, privacy, and user control. In a post shared on X, Buterin said the Ethereum ecosystem had experienced “backsliding” in core values over the past decade but that new efforts are underway to restore trustless systems and self-sovereign tools for users.

The Ethereum co-founder pointed to several ongoing technical efforts that aim to make it easier to run nodes, interact with dApps, and protect user data. He referred to projects such as Kohaku, a wallet design that is privacy-oriented and uses ZK-EVM and BAL to enable full node operation to be accessible once again.

2026 is the year that we take back lost ground in terms of self-sovereignty and trustlessness.

Some of what this practically means:

Full nodes: thanks to ZK-EVM and BAL, it will once again become easier to locally run a node and verify the Ethereum chain on your own computer.…

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) January 16, 2026

Buterin said the Ethereum community has made tradeoffs in the interest of usability, but that 2026 is a turning point in direction. He added that developers need to work on making tools less censorship-resistant and permissionless, which could require them to take even longer timelines to develop.

New Tools and Privacy Upgrades Target Ethereum’s Core Mission

According to CNF, 2025 saw the successful deployment of zero-knowledge EVMs and the PeerDAS scaling architecture. Buterin, however, stressed that the concept of decentralization should not be compromised, despite the expansion of the network.

According to him, users ought to have the ability to authenticate blockchain data directly instead of using centralized RPCs. This is facilitated by applications like Helios, which offer light access to clients to enable them to be verified without a full node. Other systems, such as Oblivious RAM (ORAM) and Private Information Retrieval (PIR), are also under testing to minimize data exposure to access dApps. These tools assist in avoiding the situation where RPC providers gather information about the apps used by users.

Buterin also reiterated support for social recovery wallets and timelocks. All these solutions are being established in an attempt to make wallets more secure without relying more on custodians that are centralized. The concept is to create systems in which the user can recover money in a secure manner, even when they lose private keys.

As CNF outlined, Ethereum’s recent upgrades include EIP-7702 from the Pectra update, which supports account abstraction and advanced wallet controls. Buterin said these steps are key to building wallets that remain user-owned and resilient, not tied to tech companies or central platforms.

He also desires additional dApps to execute into onchain user interfaces via IPFS, as opposed to hosted web servers. This will minimize the chances of hacked or offline interfaces interrupting the accessibility or embezzling the funds.

As CNF described, Buterin had earlier criticized the use of centralized cloud providers after a series of Ethereum dApps were taken down in the 2025 Cloudflare outage. He encouraged developers to go back to creating trust-reduced systems that support the original purpose of Ethereum. Ethereum price has, however, shown a bearish setup in the last few days, following the Bitcoin price trend after it failed to hold above $95,000. At press time, the ETH price was trading at $3,299, a 0.5% decline.