I now have comprehensive information about Vitalik Buterin's recent statements on Ethereum's goals to become the "world computer." Let me create the article based on this research.
Vitalik Buterin's vision for Ethereum's evolution extends beyond technological upgrades and market performance. In his January 1, 2026 message, the Ethereum co-founder articulated a renewed commitment to the network's foundational mission: building decentralized applications that operate as resilient infrastructure for a free and open internet.
This statement came as Ethereum celebrated significant technical achievements in 2025 while confronting fundamental questions about its long-term purpose and economic model.
The network increased gas limits, expanded blob capacity, improved node software quality, and achieved critical zkEVM performance milestones throughout 2025. Zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines reduced block proof time from 16 minutes to 16 seconds—a 45-fold improvement in both cost and speed.
PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling) advanced Ethereum toward handling exponentially greater data throughput without requiring every node to download complete datasets. These technical accomplishments positioned Ethereum as what Buterin describes as "a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of blockchain".
Yet technical progress alone fails to fulfill Ethereum's ambitions. Buterin explicitly rejected the pursuit of "winning the next meta"—whether through tokenized dollars, political memecoins, or artificially inflating blockspace to restore ETH's deflationary properties.
Instead, he returned to the original vision of Ethereum as the "world computer," emphasizing two interdependent objectives that determine whether the network achieves this status.
Usability and Scalability at Every Layer
The first objective centers on achieving usability at scale across both the blockchain infrastructure layer and the application layer.
This requirement extends beyond raw transaction throughput to encompass the entire stack of software used to run and interact with the blockchain.
Ethereum processed over 2.1 million daily transactions in December 2025, marking a 71% increase from the previous year despite price volatility.
This growth reflected broader adoption in decentralized finance and tokenized assets, with total value locked in Ethereum DeFi protocols reaching approximately $62-70 billion by late 2025, representing over 60% of the global DeFi ecosystem. The network's ability to handle increasing activity while maintaining security demonstrated progress toward scalability goals.
The rollup-centric roadmap emerged as the cornerstone of Ethereum's scaling strategy. Layer 2 networks now process 60% of Ethereum-related transactions, with platforms like Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism handling billions in value.
The Dencun upgrade in March 2024 introduced blob transactions through EIP-4844, creating dedicated blockspace for rollups to post data at dramatically reduced costs. The Pectra upgrade in May 2025 doubled blob capacity from three to six blobs per block, increasing daily data throughput to approximately 8.15GB.
These improvements reduced Layer 2 transaction costs by over 90% compared to pre-blob architecture. Base network transactions, for instance, averaged approximately $0.005 per transaction. zkEVM implementations achieved the performance milestone of processing 99% of mainnet blocks within 10 seconds on target hardware.
The 2026 roadmap anticipates further gas limit increases from the current 60 million to potentially 180-200 million by year-end, enabling 50% higher transaction throughput on the base layer.
PeerDAS represents the next phase of data availability scaling. Rather than requiring every node to download all blob data, PeerDAS distributes data across network participants, with each regular node subscribing to 8 of 128 column subnets and therefore downloading only 1/16th of all data.
Nodes with validators holding at least 4,096 ETH must subscribe to all subnets as "supernodes," ensuring data redundancy and network healing when gaps occur. This architecture enables Ethereum to scale data availability capacity with network size rather than individual node capacity.
The emphasis on usability extends to user-facing applications. Ethereum 2026 roadmap priorities include interoperability solutions like the Ethereum Interoperability Layer, designed to unify over 55 Layer 2 rollups into a seamless experience.
The Open Intents Framework allows users to express desired outcomes without specifying technical execution paths, automating cross-chain interactions. Latency reduction initiatives target slashing finality times from the current 13-19 minutes to 15-30 seconds by Q1 2026 through Fast L1 Confirmation Rules and research into halving block times from 12 to 6 seconds.
However, achieving usability at scale means more than technical specifications. Applications must function reliably even as centralized dependencies fail—a standard Buterin characterizes as essential for genuine decentralization.
True Decentralization Across Infrastructure and Applications
The second objective demands genuine decentralization at both the blockchain layer and the application layer.
This requirement goes beyond distributing validators or nodes to encompass a more fundamental question: Can applications continue functioning if their original developers disappear, if centralized infrastructure providers like Cloudflare experience outages or attacks, and if companies or political regimes attempt censorship?
Buterin introduced what he calls the "walkaway test"—the principle that decentralized applications must continue operating even after original developers abandon them. Applications must resist fraud, censorship, and third-party interference while protecting user privacy.
These properties, once commonplace in offline products like wallets, books, and cars, have increasingly vanished as digital services transform into subscription models that "consign users to permanent dependence on some centralized overlord".
Ethereum's architecture provides foundational censorship resistance through its proof-of-stake consensus mechanism and globally distributed validator set. The network maintained approximately 1,000 sequencers across 15,000 nodes in more than 50 countries by late 2025.
This distribution prevents any single entity from controlling transaction inclusion or altering network state. The multi-client architecture, with multiple independent implementations of Ethereum's specification, adds resilience against software vulnerabilities that could compromise a single client.
Yet decentralization faces persistent challenges. The introduction of Proposer-Builder Separation created specialized roles where block builders select which transactions to include before proposers finalize blocks. This separation, while improving network efficiency, concentrated power among a small number of sophisticated builders.
Following the August 2022 sanctions on Tornado Cash, several major block builders began filtering transactions associated with the privacy protocol, demonstrating how compliance pressures can translate into on-chain censorship.
The 2026 Glamsterdam upgrade addresses these concerns by enshrining Proposer-Builder Separation directly into the protocol rather than relying on third-party infrastructure. This "ePBS" (enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation) approach aims to reduce MEV concentration and lower censorship risk at the block production level.
Fork-Choice Inclusion Lists (FOCIL), planned for the Hegota upgrade in late 2026, provide additional censorship resistance by allowing proposers to specify transactions that builders must include.
Application-layer decentralization presents more complex challenges. Many decentralized applications rely on centralized infrastructure for frontend hosting, data indexing, and RPC endpoints. If these centralized dependencies fail, users cannot access supposedly decentralized protocols.
The Aztec Network's adversarial testnet explicitly tests whether the network can recover independently if core team members and servers disappear—a practical implementation of the walkaway test.
Privacy infrastructure remains critical to achieving meaningful decentralization. Buterin has consistently emphasized that privacy is "not optional but a prerequisite for mainstream adoption".
Privacy Pools, developed by 0xbow and supported by a whitepaper co-authored by Buterin, enable compliant anonymity by segregating legitimate deposits from those linked to illicit activity. The technology uses zero-knowledge proofs to allow users to demonstrate their funds' legitimacy to regulators without revealing transaction details.
The Kohaku wallet project, introduced at Devcon 2025, integrates privacy-enhancing technologies into wallet infrastructure by default. This open-source modular stack includes Railgun and Privacy Pools, enabling users to hide publicly visible funds while maintaining compliance with regulatory requirements.
The goal is providing default privacy for any wallet connected to Ethereum rather than requiring users to opt into specialized privacy tools.
Decentralization at the blockchain layer increasingly depends on minimizing state growth and maintaining accessibility for home validators. Verkle Trees, planned for the Hegota upgrade, replace Merkle Patricia Trees with a more efficient data structure that dramatically reduces witness sizes and enables stateless clients.
This allows validators to verify blocks without storing Ethereum's entire state, lowering hardware requirements and preserving the decentralized validator set.
Economic Tensions and Strategic Trade-Offs
Ethereum's progress toward these goals created unexpected economic pressures in 2025. Layer 2 networks contributed only $10 million to Ethereum mainnet in 2025—down from $113 million in 2024—as the Dencun upgrade's dramatic reduction in blob fees shifted value capture away from the base layer.
This $100+ million revenue decline weakened ETH's deflationary dynamics, with the network's inflation rate rising to 0.204% since the September 2022 Merge.
The tension between scaling efficiently and maintaining economic sustainability for the base layer represents a fundamental challenge. Ethereum sacrificed guaranteed fee revenue to subsidize ecosystem growth and enable affordable transactions on Layer 2s.
This strategic choice prioritizes long-term network effects and user adoption over short-term token economics, betting that a thriving application ecosystem ultimately drives value to the settlement layer.
Buterin's framework explicitly rejects optimizing for metrics like base layer fee revenue or ETH price appreciation in isolation. The mission centers on building applications with specific resilience properties—applications that transcend "the rise and fall of companies, ideologies and political parties".
These properties include the ability to function without fraud, continue operating when developers disappear, remain accessible even if major infrastructure providers fail, and protect user privacy across financial, identity, and governance use cases.
Quantum Security and Long-Term Resilience
The roadmap also addresses existential technical threats. Buterin warned that elliptic curve cryptography, which secures both Ethereum and Bitcoin, could become vulnerable to quantum computing breakthroughs by 2028.
Prediction platforms estimate quantum computers may achieve the capability to factor large numbers by 2034, roughly two decades sooner than earlier forecasts suggested. This timeline gives Ethereum approximately four years to migrate to quantum-resistant cryptography—a challenge requiring coordination across the entire ecosystem.
The 2026 security roadmap establishes progressive milestones for zkEVM implementations, mandating that all teams integrate their proof systems with the Ethereum Foundation's soundcalc security assessment tool by February 2026.
The Glamsterdam standard requires 100-bit provable security by May 2026, with the final Hegota goal targeting 128-bit provable security by December 2026. This security-first approach responds to recent developments where several STARK-based zkEVMs had underlying mathematical conjectures disproven, reducing their security levels.
Institutional Adoption and Market Maturation
Despite short-term price volatility, institutional adoption accelerated throughout 2025. Spot Ethereum ETFs attracted $32 billion in inflows, with BlackRock's ETHA leading at $12.6 billion in assets. These products captured 19% of U.S.
Ethereum trading volume, establishing regulated exposure channels for traditional finance participants. Standard Chartered raised its year-end Ethereum price target to $7,500, citing increased corporate adoption and regulatory clarity.
The convergence of institutional interest with technical infrastructure improvements positions Ethereum as foundational settlement infrastructure for tokenized assets and stablecoins. Platforms like Stripe and Visa adopted Ethereum-based rails for payment processing.
World Chain rollup served over 25 million users, while Base processed over 40% of weekly $500 billion stablecoin volume. These adoption metrics suggest Ethereum's role is evolving from a speculative asset to critical infrastructure for global digital commerce.
The Path Forward
Ethereum's mission to become the world computer requires simultaneous progress along multiple dimensions: technical scalability, application-layer innovation, censorship resistance, privacy preservation, quantum readiness, and ecosystem coordination.
The network made substantial advances in 2025 across gas limits, blob capacity, zkEVM performance, and node software quality. Yet Buterin's message emphasizes that technical achievements alone remain insufficient.
The world computer vision demands applications that users can depend on regardless of corporate decisions, political shifts, or infrastructure failures—applications whose stability derives from cryptographic guarantees and decentralized consensus rather than institutional promises.
Achieving this requires maintaining usability and genuine decentralization at both the blockchain infrastructure layer and the application layer, where software interfaces with users and provides actual utility.
As Ethereum enters 2026, the roadmap balances immediate scaling needs with long-term security imperatives. The Glamsterdam upgrade targets execution efficiency and decentralization through enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation and gas optimizations.
The Hegota upgrade introduces Verkle Trees and enhanced privacy mechanisms. The Fusaka upgrade expands blob data availability through PeerDAS. Each component addresses specific technical challenges while advancing the broader mission of building resilient, censorship-resistant infrastructure for a free and open internet.
The world computer vision represents more than technological ambition. It articulates a philosophy about how digital infrastructure should function in an increasingly centralized digital landscape—as systems that empower rather than constrain, that preserve user autonomy rather than extract dependence, and that operate according to cryptographic rules rather than institutional discretion.
Whether Ethereum achieves these goals depends not only on protocol upgrades and scaling solutions but on whether the applications built atop this infrastructure embody these principles in practice.
