Ethereum Progressed in 2025, Must Decentralize in 2026

Vitalik Buterin stressed that Ethereum’s next phase depends as much on decentralization as on technical upgrades.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has urged the Ethereum community to remain vigilant against centralization.

This comes as the network celebrates major technical achievements made in 2025.

Decentralization and Usability

In a new year’s message shared via X, Buterin outlined that Ethereum’s future depends not only on technical progress but also on protecting its core values of decentralization and usability.

“Welcome to 2026! Milady is back,” he wrote before turning to what he described as a central challenge for the network.

Buterin said Ethereum must do more to meet its own stated goals, explaining that the project is not about chasing the next trend, whether that involves tokenized dollars, political meme coins, or efforts to fill block space for short-term objectives. Instead, he reaffirmed its mission to build the world’s computer that serves as a central infrastructure piece of a freer and open internet.

He described the network as a platform for decentralized applications that operate without fraud, censorship, or third-party interference. According to him, these applications should continue running even if their original developers disappear, adding that users should not be affected by failures or security breaches of major centralized services.

He also believes that such applications should remain stable despite changes in companies, ideologies, or political systems while also advocating for privacy.

You may also like:

The programmer further said that these principles may seem unusual today, but they were once common features of everyday tools. He compared this with the growing shift toward subscription-based services that create long-term dependence on centralized providers, describing the chain as a response to that trend.

To succeed, Buterin advocates for Ethereum being usable at scale and truly decentralized at the blockchain and application level. He also emphasized that the ecosystem already has strong tools available and must continue applying them to strengthen these features.

Technical Progress Made in 2025

The 31-year-old also reflected on Ethereum’s development over the past year, outlining that it had achieved several major upgrades in 2025, including increases to gas limits and blob counts, improvements in node software quality, and major performance milestones reached by zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines.

According to him, the combination of zkEVMs and PeerDAS represents the ecosystem’s largest step so far toward becoming a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of blockchain. These developments, he said, show that Ethereum continues to evolve at a technical level while moving toward its long-term goals. He added that while meaningful change has already been made, further improvements are still required.