Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum made progress in 2025, must decentralize in 2026

Vitalik Buterin emphasized that Ethereum’s next phase relies as much on decentralization as it does on technical upgrades.

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

This comes as the network celebrates the major technical achievements achieved by 2025.

Decentralization and usability

In a New Year’s message shared via

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

Buterin said Ethereum needs to do more to achieve its own stated goals, explaining that the project is not about chasing the next trend, whether it’s tokenized dollars, political meme coins or attempts to fill block space for short-term goals. Instead, he reaffirmed his mission to build the world’s computer to serve as a central part of the infrastructure for a freer and open Internet.

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

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

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

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

Technical progress made by 2025

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

According to him, the combination of zkEVMs and PeerDAS represents the ecosystem’s biggest step yet toward a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of blockchain. These developments, he said, show that Ethereum continues to evolve on a technical level as it moves toward its long-term goals. He added that while meaningful changes have already been made, further improvements are still needed.