Vitalik Buterin to Ethereum Developers: Build It Like It Has to Last Without You

The backdrop is difficult. ETH is sitting nearly 40% below its all-time high. Solana has been pulling developer talent at a pace that’s hard to ignore. And inside the Ethereum Foundation itself, tensions have surfaced – most notably from co-founder Joseph Lubin, who has called for new leadership capable of meeting what he describes as a fundamentally different competitive environment.

Buterin’s response isn’t a rebranding exercise. It’s a harder line.

“CROPS” and Non-Negotiables

At the center of Buterin’s 2026 framework is what he defines as the non-negotiable core of the Ethereum stack: Censorship Resistance, Resilience, Openness, Privacy, and Security — a set of principles he frames as a clear boundary that shouldn’t be crossed regardless of adoption pressures.

These aren’t new values for Ethereum. What’s changed is the urgency with which Buterin is defending them. He’s framing 2026 as a direct pushback against the creeping centralization of the broader internet – a “rebellion,” in his words, aimed at reclaiming lost ground.

The Walkaway Test

One of the more concrete proposals Buterin is pushing is what he calls the “Walkaway Test”: the idea that a well-built application should function like a hammer. You pick it up, it works, and it keeps working whether or not the people who made it are still around.

That means no dependency on trusted servers, no single point of failure, and no scenario where a developer or vendor can lock users out. To get there, he’s advocating for on-chain UIs hosted via IPFS – a direct move away from the kind of centralized web infrastructure that currently underpins most Ethereum-facing applications.

On the privacy side, the goal is to make private transactions as frictionless as public ones. Technologies like ORAM and Private Information Retrieval are being positioned as the path toward blocking RPC middleman surveillance – currently a quiet but significant vulnerability in how users interact with the network.

Buterin has also been increasingly vocal about what he calls “sanctuary tech” – tools built not for speculation, but to help people navigate genuine real-world pressures: financial instability, censorship, and the erosion of digital autonomy. It’s a pointed contrast to the memecoin culture that dominated Ethereum’s recent cycle.

Two Forks, One Strategy

The technical roadmap for 2026 is organized around two major protocol upgrades.

The first, Glamsterdam, is targeted for the first half of the year. It marks a deliberate shift back toward strengthening Ethereum’s base layer rather than offloading everything to Layer 2s. Key features include enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation, which moves block construction directly onto the protocol to reduce censorship risk and remove centralized relays from the equation. Parallel transaction execution is also on the table via Block-Level Access Lists, effectively turning the network’s processing into a multi-lane road rather than a single-file queue. The L1 gas limit is expected to jump from 60 million to 100 million, with some estimates pointing toward 200 million following ePBS deployment.

The second fork, Hegotá, is slated for the second half of the year and targets a different problem: storage bloat. Running a full Ethereum node has become increasingly demanding, and Hegotá aims to reverse that trend through better historical data management – including potential implementation of Verkle or binary trees – so that ordinary users on standard hardware can still participate meaningfully in the network. Fork-Choice Inclusion Lists are also part of the package, designed to give a wider pool of validators the ability to mandate transaction inclusion, further hardening censorship resistance at the consensus layer.

ZK-EVM and the Path to 10,000 TPS

Underpinning both upgrades is Buterin’s longer-term bet on Zero-Knowledge technology. Rather than re-executing every transaction, validators would shift to verifying ZK proofs – a fundamentally lighter operation. The first ZK-EVM-compatible clients are expected to debut in 2026, with initial adoption estimated around 5% of the network. That’s a small footprint, but Buterin frames it as a low-cost entry point for solo stakers who want to participate without running heavyweight infrastructure.

The end target, if ZK-EVM integration into the base layer proceeds as planned, is 10,000 transactions per second – a figure that would make rollups largely redundant for basic scaling purposes.

Buterin has also called for a “garbage collection” approach to protocol complexity overall, arguing that a system only a handful of experts can understand isn’t genuinely trustless. His benchmark: a smart high school student should be able to read and reason about the codebase.

Where Things Stand

In February 2026, Buterin sold approximately 17,196 ETH – worth around $35 million at the time – bringing his holdings down to roughly 224,000 ETH. Whether read as portfolio management or a signal of something more, the sale landed in a market still processing Ethereum’s prolonged underperformance relative to its own history.

The 2026 roadmap is ambitious. Whether it’s enough to stabilize Ethereum’s position against a resurgent Solana, address internal governance concerns, and deliver meaningful user-facing privacy improvements in a single year remains an open question. But Buterin, at least, appears to have made his priorities clear.

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