Crypto: Sacrificing Ethereum’s Values For Mainstream Adoption Must Stop...

Crypto: Sacrificing Ethereum’s Values For Mainstream Adoption Must Stop...

“2026 is the year that we take back lost ground in terms of self-sovereignty and trustlessness,” Buterin posted to X on Friday:

To reverse that trend, Buterin wants to see improved private payments, lower the barrier to entry for users to run full nodes and decentralized apps that don’t run on centralized servers.

He also wants users to more easily take control of their onchain data and see improved social recovery wallets that protect funds when seed phrases are lost or extracted by an attacker.

“In many of these areas, over the last ten years we have seen serious backsliding in Ethereum,” Buterin said. “Nodes went from easy to run to hard to run. Dapps went from static pages to complicated behemoths that leak all your data to a dozen servers.”

Buterin said upcoming upgrades, including the Kohaku release and the Glamsterdam fork, are expected to address some of these issues.

Buterin said earlier this week that Ethereum needs to pass the “walkaway test,” meaning Ethereum becomes self-sustainable without developer influence for decades to come.

“Being able to say ‘Ethereum’s protocol, as it stands today, is cryptographically safe for a hundred years’ is something we should strive to get to as soon as possible,” he said.

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Quantum resistance features, more scalable architecture, and a better block-building model that resists centralization pressures were among the main improvements Buterin said Ethereum needs to have to pass the test of time.

Buterin also called for better decentralized stablecoins on Ethereum to truly give people independence from governments and the traditional financial system.

Source: CoinTelegraph