Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin rang in 2026 by changing his X profile picture back to a Milady-style avatar and pairing it with a manifesto-like post that refocused Ethereum’s identity on a single, old-school ambition: to be the “world’s computer” for the open internet.
“Welcome to 2026! Milady is back,” Buterin wrote, before noting what he envisioned as Ethereum’s progress for 2025: higher gas limits, larger blob counts, better node software quality, and zkEVMs hitting big performance milestones. He also argued that “with zkEVM and PeerDAS ethereum has made its biggest step in becoming a new and powerful form of blockchain.”
Ethereum Must Bring Global Computing
But the post’s center of gravity was not the winning piece. It was a warning that the network is still falling short of its stated goals and that chasing any print narrative is not the point.
Buterin drew a bright line between Ethereum’s long-term mechanics and the trend-driven motivations that often dominate crypto cycles. “Ethereum needs to do more to meet its stated goals,” he wrote. “Not the desire to ‘win the next meta’ regardless of dollar tokens or political memecoins, not by convincing people to help us fill the blockspace to do ETH ultrasound again, but the goal: To build a global computer that serves as the central infrastructure of a free and open internet.”
From there, he offered a definition of what “global computing” should mean in practice: applications transferred to environments that cannot be silently modified or closed, and that remain usable even when the companies and infrastructure most users take for granted fail.
“We’re building decentralized applications. Applications that work without fraud, censorship or third-party interference,” he wrote. “Apps that pass the walkway test: they continue to work even if the original developers disappear. Apps where if you’re a user, you don’t even notice Cloudflare going down — or even if all of Cloudflare gets hacked by North Korea.”
Buterin extended expectations beyond money, clearly defining identity, governance, and “any other infrastructure of civilization that people want to build,” and emphasized privacy as a core asset rather than a nice-to-have.
A notable thread in the post is that Buterin refuses to handle high-level usability and decentralization like Ethereum can’t keep up with. “To achieve this, it needs to be (i) usable, and scalable, and (ii) actually scalable,” he wrote, arguing that those requirements apply to both the base layer—”including the software we use to run and talk to the blockchain”—and the application layer.
That framework puts pressure on many areas at once: core protocol functionality, customer diversity and quality, multi-supplier infrastructure, and dapp architectures that can survive developer abandonment while still meeting user expectations.
Buterin closed the decision note rather than being specific, saying that Ethereum has “powerful tools” but needs to use them more aggressively. “All these pieces need to be improved – they are already being improved, but they need to be improved more,” he wrote. “Fortunately, we have powerful tools on our side – but we need to use them, and we will.”
At press time, ETH traded at $3,030.
Featured image from YouTube, chart from TradingView.com
Planning process because bitcoinist focuses on delivering well-researched, accurate, and unbiased content. We maintain strict sourcing standards, and each page is diligently reviewed by our team of senior technical experts and experienced editors. This process ensures the integrity, relevance, and value of our content to our readers.
