Ethereum 2026: No Longer Obsessed with Mainstream Adoption, Vitalik Bets on Trustlessness

In 2026, it will be the time when we decide that mainstream adoption at the cost of core values is not worth it. "Good enough" decentralization is not good enough. Users should receive something better than trusting infrastructure providers to access a "trustless" network.

Author: Stacy Muur

Translation: Deep Tide TechFlow

Original link: https://x.com/stacy_muur/status/2019325467116126348

Deep Tide Overview: Over the past decade, Ethereum has made carefully calculated compromises. It traded trustlessness for convenience, autonomy for user experience, and decentralization for mainstream adoption. But 2026 marks a turning point. This is the year Ethereum no longer asks, "Is it worth diluting itself for mainstream adoption?" The answer is—no longer worth it. Stacy Muur details Vitalik's vision: making full nodes easy to run again with ZK-EVM + block-level access lists, achieving verifiable RPC through Helios light clients, enabling private payments through ORAM/PIR, surpassing fragile mnemonic phrases with social recovery, achieving unstoppable dapp UIs through IPFS hosting, and enabling censorship-resistant block building through FOCIL. The re-centralization of the infrastructure layer must end.

Over the past decade, Ethereum has made carefully calculated compromises. It traded trustlessness for convenience, autonomy for user experience, and decentralization for mainstream adoption.

Every time you check your wallet balance, you are trusting companies like Alchemy or Infura. Every time you use a dapp, your data leaks to servers you never chose.

But 2026 marks a turning point. This is the year Ethereum no longer asks, "Is it worth diluting itself for mainstream adoption?" The answer is—no longer worth it.

Vision

Full nodes easy to run again (ZK-EVM + block-level access lists)
Verifiable RPC instead of blind trust (Helios light client)
Private payments with public payment UX
Wallets that surpass fragile mnemonics (social recovery)
Unstoppable dapp UI (IPFS hosting)
Censorship-resistant block building (FOCIL)

Issue: Re-centralization of Infrastructure

Even if the base layer remains decentralized, Ethereum's infrastructure has become increasingly centralized.

Nodes have shifted from being laptop-friendly to requiring 800+ GB of storage and 24-hour synchronization. Dapps have evolved from simple HTML pages to server-side monsters that leak your data everywhere. Wallets have shifted from user-controlled RPCs to hard-coded providers that track everything you do.

Most notably, now 80-90% of Ethereum blocks are produced by just 2 builders. This concentration allows transactions to be controlled by a few entities, who can censor anything they want.

These are not mistakes; they are pragmatic choices made under proof-of-work constraints.

But the costs are real: trust assumptions quietly enter the "trustless" system, single points of failure surge, and users lose true autonomy. We decentralized the ledger but re-centralized the access layer.

The 2026 Landscape

Full Nodes

Today's reality: 800+ GB storage, 24-hour synchronization, requiring continuous operation. Most users give up.

Block-level access lists (BAL) fundamentally change this. Think of BAL as a directory for each block, telling you in advance which states the block will touch. Your computer pre-fetches everything in parallel before execution begins. Non-conflicting transactions run simultaneously on separate cores. Analysis shows that 60-80% of transactions have no overlap.

Combined with ZK proofs that verify blocks without re-executing everything, synchronization times drop significantly, and storage becomes manageable. Running nodes shifts back from "infrastructure companies only" to "decent laptop territory."

Helios: Verifiable RPC

Imagine this attack: you swap on Uniswap. Your malicious RPC shows you fake prices. The tokens you sign to accept are fewer than you should receive. The RPC executes a sandwich attack and keeps the profit. You never see it coming.

This hasn't happened among major providers yet, but it is technically possible. The problem: you are trusting others to tell you the blockchain state.

Helios solves this in 2 seconds. It is a light client that tracks the validators' "sync committee" (512 validators, about 27-hour cycles). If 2/3+ sign the block header, it is canonical. When you check your balance, Helios requests a Merkle proof from an untrusted RPC and verifies it locally. The RPC can refuse to answer but cannot lie.

It can run anywhere: laptops, phones, browser extensions. Use it as your MetaMask RPC, and every dapp becomes trustless without changing anything else.

The technology exists today, open-source and ready for integration.

ORAM/PIR: Private RPC Queries

Every RPC query leaks your behavior—what addresses you observe, which protocols you use, and when you use them.

ORAM (Oblivious RAM) uses a tree structure to hide access patterns. The server sees you accessing data but cannot determine which data it is. Signal messenger uses this, reducing costs by 100 times (from 500 servers down to 6).

PIR (Private Information Retrieval) allows you to query a database without revealing what you want. You send an encrypted query, the server processes the encrypted data, and you decrypt the answer. The response size remains constant (about 3KB) regardless of the database size.

Real implementations exist today:

Oblivious Labs: Private WBTC balance checker
Private ENS resolution
QuietRPC: Private RPC exploration

The challenge is dynamic state: re-encoding 33 million elements takes 4-20 minutes. The solution involves periodic snapshots with on-chain proofs. For most uses (balance checks, voting eligibility), a few minutes of staleness is acceptable for privacy guarantees.

Social Recovery: Surpassing Fragile Mnemonics

Current wallets force impossible choices:

Lost mnemonic → lose everything
Mnemonic stolen → lose everything
Cloud backup → sovereignty backdoored

Social recovery decentralizes trust. You have a daily signing key plus "guardians" (friends, family, other devices). Recovery requires 3/5 guardian approvals. A time lock (48-72 hours) prevents instant theft while allowing legitimate recovery.

Dropped your phone in a lake? Contact your guardians, they approve a new key, the time lock activates, and you regain access. If someone steals your key and tries to do this, you cancel during the time lock.

Security: An attacker needs to simultaneously obtain 3/5 guardians. You have days to respond. Each guardian has only partial power. No tech company backdoors.

Wallets like Argent and others support this today. The goal for 2026: make it a standard everywhere, with a UX anyone can use.

Public UX for Private Payments

Privacy tools exist but are painful: different apps, poor UX, 3-5 times gas costs, limited support. Almost no one uses them.

The goal for 2026: privacy = public experience. Same wallet, same interface, comparable costs. Privacy becomes a checkbox, not a research project.

Technology: zkSNARK (proving you have funds without revealing which), stealth addresses (one-time address for each transaction), account abstraction integration.

FOCIL: Censorship-Resistant Privacy

If builders refuse to include private payments, private payments are worthless. With 80-90% of blocks coming from 2 builders, censorship is easy.

FOCIL (Fork Choice Forced Inclusion List) makes censorship impossible:

Every time slot, randomly select 16 validators to build an "inclusion list" from the mempool transactions (each 8KB). Block builders must include these transactions. Proposers only vote for blocks that meet the inclusion list. Without votes, the block cannot become canonical.

Why it works:

Committee-based: Only 1 honest validator out of 16 is needed
Fork choice forced: Built into consensus, cannot be bypassed
Same slot: No delay
Anywhere in the block: Builders optimize MEV but cannot censor

For privacy: If a validator includes your private transaction, it must be in the block. Builders cannot censor without losing money.

IPFS Hosting for Dapps

When you access Uniswap, you load the web app from their server. If the server goes down, you are locked out. If hacked for a second, a malicious UI can drain your wallet. If under pressure, they provide different UIs to different users.

IPFS solution: use content-addressed hosting for UIs (identified by hashes rather than servers). Anyone can provide content. Changing the UI changes the hash. ENS maps friendly names to hashes.

Benefits: no single point of failure, impossible to hijack, censorship-resistant, verifiable.

Challenges: updates mean new hashes. Solution: ENS records point to the latest hash, gradually decentralizing to DAO governance.

Why This Matters

"In a world computer, there are no centralized overlords. No single point of failure. Only love." — Vitalik

If Ethereum is just another platform that requires trusting intermediaries, why not use AWS?

The answer must be that Ethereum offers something truly different: real ownership, true permissionlessness, actual censorship resistance, and genuine autonomy.

But these only matter when accessible. A theoretically decentralized system accessed through centralized bottlenecks is just decentralized theater.

The Stakes:

Success: Ethereum becomes the infrastructure of the open internet, users control their wealth/data, and privacy is the default
Failure: Regulatory capture of the access layer, users abandon crypto for honest CBDCs, and the cypherpunk dream dies

Conclusion

A pragmatic decade has proven that blockchains work. Now we prove they work without sacrificing principles.

This won't all happen in the next version release. Building a trustless system with great UX takes time. Coordinating hundreds of developers takes even longer.

But the commitment is absolute. Every decision is evaluated against the following standard: does it increase trustlessness and autonomy?

The technical pieces are in place. Helios provides verifiable RPC today. ORAM/PIR proves private queries are effective. Social recovery exists in production. FOCIL's censorship resistance has been specified. The path is clear.

Now let Ethereum build.

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