Vitalik Buterin Urges Ethereum to Refocus on Decentralization

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin marked the arrival of 2026 with a reflective post on X, urging the blockchain network to prioritize its foundational mission of becoming a decentralized "world computer" for a freer internet, even as he highlighted significant technical gains from the previous year.

In the post, shared on January 1, Buterin updated his profile image to a Milady Maker NFT, a move that coincided with a sharp rise in the collection's floor price, which climbed nearly 30 percent to about 1.07 ETH within 24 hours, according to marketplace data. He began by welcoming the new year and recapping Ethereum's 2025 advancements, including increased gas limits, expanded data blob capacity, enhanced node software reliability, and key performance improvements in zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines, or zkEVMs. These upgrades, along with progress in the PeerDAS data availability system, have made the network more scalable and efficient, allowing it to handle greater transaction volumes while preserving its core decentralized structure.

Buterin stressed that such technical milestones, while important, fall short of Ethereum's ultimate goals. "Ethereum needs to do more to...