Ethereum, the pioneering decentralized network, is on the cusp of a significant transformation. Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of Ethereum, has outlined an ambitious roadmap for 2026, aiming to reverse a decade of compromises made in the name of convenience. His core argument is that while the underlying protocol has remained steadfastly trustless, the practical user experience has gradually drifted towards centralization. Wallets have increasingly relied on centralized Remote Procedure Call (RPC) providers for essential functions, decentralized applications (dApps) have become server-dependent, often leaking user data, and the crucial process of block building has consolidated in the hands of a few powerful entities. The protocol's foundational integrity has held, but the way users interact with it has fundamentally shifted.
The proposed solution is a clear, actionable set of infrastructure improvements designed to make the trust-minimized path not just possible, but the default and easiest option for every user. These initiatives range from verifiable RPC clients that empower local verification, to cryptographic tools for private information retrieval, structural changes for censorship resistance, and optimizations for running nodes. This isn't merely theoretical research; it is a concerted effort to bake these principles into the very fabric of how users engage with Ethereum, with the Ethereum Foundation's Kohaku wallet project serving as a key vehicle to translate these advancements into tangible user behavior.
Reclaiming Verification: The End of Blind Trust in RPCs
Today, a typical Ethereum wallet routes almost every query through remote RPC providers. These are centralized services that answer questions about your balance, the network state, and transaction statuses. The inherent problem? Users are often blindly trusting these external servers, creating a potential point of failure and centralization. This reliance was starkly highlighted by incidents like the Polygon RPC disruption, underscoring the fragility of centralized data points.
Enter Helios, a revolutionary light client developed by a16z crypto. Helios tackles this problem head on by converting data from an untrusted RPC into a verifiably safe, local RPC. Imagine syncing with the network in a mere two seconds, then having a local JSON-RPC server running on your machine, ready to serve locally verified data for both Ethereum and OP Stack networks like Optimism and Base. Instead of accepting what a remote server tells you, Helios verifies cryptographic proofs. While it still uses weak subjectivity checkpoints for initial setup and may lean on an upstream execution endpoint for specific data, it significantly reduces the need for blind trust.
The real game-changer here is making verifiability a default user experience. If wallets integrate a verified light client path like Helios by default, the decentralization of RPCs transforms from a niche technical preference into a fundamental feature that every user benefits from automatically, without complex configurations. The Ethereum Foundation backed Kohaku wallet effort is explicitly planning to ship with Helios integrated, making this vision a reality.
Protecting Privacy: Tackling the Metadata Leak Problem
In a world striving for digital privacy, private payments can feel incomplete if every balance check and dApp interaction leaves a trail of metadata for servers to analyze and potentially monetize. This leakage of access patterns undermines the very essence of privacy, even if the transactions themselves are private.
Private Information Retrieval (PIR) and Oblivious RAM (ORAM) are cryptographic innovations designed to address this challenge by hiding what users query from the providers they query. Vitalik's privacy roadmap envisions a progression towards PIR as the ultimate solution for private data reads. The Privacy and Scaling Explorations team is diligently working on the significant scale challenges, aiming to reduce bandwidth per query to the kilobyte range, even with the considerable server-side computational trade-offs involved. This technology is still in its research and early engineering phases, meaning PIR and ORAM are currently trajectories and prototypes rather than fully deployed features.
Nevertheless, the long-term vision is clear: private reads are the crucial missing piece for a truly private user experience. The Kohaku roadmap acknowledges this by explicitly listing privacy-service abstraction as a first phase deliverable, signaling a commitment to moving wallet-side tooling for private reads from theoretical concepts into practical implementation.
Enhancing Censorship Resistance: Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists (FOCIL)
One of the most concerning shifts in Ethereum's transaction inclusion guarantees has been the centralization of block building. A small number of sophisticated builders now dominate block production, and this concentration weakens censorship resistance, as transaction inclusion can become dependent on their willingness to cooperate. Should these builders choose to censor specific transactions, the network's permissionless nature is compromised.
Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists (FOCIL), formalized as EIP-7805, are designed as a structural countermeasure. Under FOCIL, a committee of 16 validators produces small batches of transactions, known as inclusion lists, which must be included in the next block. Builders and proposers who fail to include these transactions face a significant fork-choice penalty, meaning network attesters will reject blocks that violate these inclusion constraints. These lists are kept small, with a maximum size of eight kilobytes, to manage bandwidth concerns.
The EIP's rationale clearly states: "a few builders controlling block production degrade censorship resistance, and that inclusion lists enforced by fork choice allow the validator set to force inclusion even when block building is centralized."
This mechanism becomes even more critical as private transaction flows, like account abstraction and private mempools, become more common. Without structural inclusion guarantees, these private flows could be more easily censored at the builder layer. FOCIL is currently a draft, and ongoing discussions focus on resolving bandwidth and denial of service concerns.
Optimizing Node Operation: Block-Level Access Lists (BAL)
Running a full Ethereum node, once a relatively simple task, has become increasingly resource intensive as the network's state grew and execution costs climbed. This escalating barrier to entry for node operators ultimately undermines decentralization by limiting participation.
Block-Level Access Lists (BALs), formalized as EIP-7928, are foundational infrastructure designed to make nodes cheaper to run and significantly faster to sync. The core idea is for each block to record precisely which accounts and storage slots were accessed, along with their post-state values. This detailed record unlocks powerful optimizations, enabling parallel disk reads, parallel transaction validation, parallel state root computation, and even 'executionless state updates.'
While still undergoing development, early benchmarks have shown promising results, with some initial variants of BAL demonstrating a roughly 30% improvement in live sync with Geth. Client teams across the ecosystem are prioritizing BALs. For instance, a Besu tracking issue links EIP-7928 to Glamsterdam, an anticipated Ethereum upgrade for 2026, highlighting its importance for parallel execution and snap sync healing. BALs may seem like 'boring' infrastructure, but it's precisely this kind of fundamental improvement that can nudge Ethereum back towards a future where running a node is a normal and accessible activity for more participants.
Kohaku: Bridging Research to Reality
All these groundbreaking protocol research efforts would remain confined to whitepapers and EIPs if they couldn't be translated into actual user experiences. This is where Kohaku comes in. As the Ethereum Foundation's dedicated initiative, Kohaku aims to turn cutting-edge protocol research into default wallet behavior.
Described as an SDK coupled with a power-user reference wallet, starting with a browser extension, Kohaku's primary goal is to significantly reduce trust assumptions for the end user. Its first phase is set to ship with a Helios light client integration, robust privacy-service abstraction, private addresses, and enhanced private balance and send flows. The roadmap clarifies that while this reference wallet isn't consumer-oriented initially, it's a fork of Ambire designed to powerfully demonstrate what privacy by default and verified RPC by default truly look like in practice. It also explicitly lists native account abstraction as a key dependency, with the team working towards its implementation throughout 2026.
Kohaku is the essential 'make it real' layer. If verified RPC, private reads, and safer recovery patterns only exist in academic papers, they won't alter user behavior. By shipping them as default features within an open-source SDK that other wallets can readily adopt, Kohaku has the potential to fundamentally shift the baseline expectations for security and decentralization across the entire Ethereum ecosystem.
The Future of Verification: Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) on Layer 1
While often discussed in the context of scaling, Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) proofs on layer 1 are also a vital mechanism for protecting decentralization. Currently, every single validator on Ethereum must re-execute every transaction to verify the chain's integrity. This 'N-of-N execution' model places a substantial computational burden on validators, increasing the cost and difficulty of participating in a trustless manner.
In a zkEVM world, this paradigm shifts dramatically to '1-of-N proving.' Instead of everyone re-executing, a single prover generates a cheap proof that validators can then verify with minimal computational effort. The primary challenge lies in proving an entire block within the strict 12-second slot time. The zkEVM research roadmap is carefully considering incentives and censorship resistance as first class concerns, acknowledging that if the prover market becomes too concentrated, the trust problem could simply reappear at a different layer.
Vitalik emphasizes the synergy between making full nodes easier (through initiatives like BALs) and the advancements in zkEVM. If proving becomes inexpensive and verification even cheaper, the overall cost of trustless participation will significantly decrease. This makes running a node, and thus contributing to the network's decentralization, more accessible to a wider range of participants, reinforcing Ethereum's core values.
A Trustless Future for Ethereum
Ethereum’s journey towards 2026 is defined by a renewed commitment to its founding principles of decentralization and trustlessness. The efforts surrounding Helios for verified RPCs, PIR/ORAM for privacy, FOCIL for censorship resistance, BALs for node accessibility, and the overarching Kohaku initiative, alongside the long-term vision of zkEVMs, collectively represent a powerful pushback against the 'default drift' towards centralization. While some of these initiatives are closer to deployment than others, their collective impact aims to fundamentally reshape the user experience, ensuring that the easiest path is also the most trust-minimized one. This comprehensive strategy underlines Ethereum's dedication to robust, resilient, and truly decentralized infrastructure, moving beyond mere convenience to uphold its promise of a permissionless future.
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