Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently set a critical timeline for the network’s future, identifying 2026 as the target year for fully reversing concerning trends toward centralization. Buterin’s declaration addresses the “backsliding” of key decentralized values, specifically self-sovereignty (the user’s ability to control assets without intermediaries) and trustlessness (reliance solely on cryptographic proof).
Buterin noted that while Ethereum has successfully navigated complex upgrades like The Merge, the rapid growth of centralized entities within the staking ecosystem and the evolving mechanism of block production threaten the core philosophy. The main concerns cited include the dominance of a few large liquid staking protocols, which introduces a single point of failure risk, and the increasing practical centralization observed in the block building process due to Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) economics.
The year 2026 is projected to be the culmination point for several deep structural fixes aimed at decentralization enforcement. Key upgrades expected to mature by this time include the widespread implementation of enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS) to algorithmically mitigate MEV centralization, and improvements in light client synchronization and state management, such as the adoption of Verkle Trees. These latter technologies are essential for reducing the resource requirements for running a full node, thereby lowering the barrier to entry and increasing the number of independent verifiers.
By focusing the development roadmap on these core protocol changes, Buterin aims to ensure that Ethereum’s trust assumptions are hardcoded into the cryptography and mechanism design, rather than relying on the social consensus or the integrity of large, centralized actors.
コメント