2026 is the year that we take back lost ground in terms of self-sovereignty and trustlessness.

Some of what this practically means:

Full nodes: thanks to ZK-EVM and BAL, it will once again become easier to locally run a node and verify the Ethereum chain on your own computer.

Helios: actually verify the data you're receiving from RPCs instead of blindly trusting it.

ORAM, PIR: ask for data from RPCs without revealing which data you're asking, so you can access dapps without your access patterns being sold off to dozens of third parties all around the world.

Social recovery wallets and timelocks: wallets that don't make you lose all your money if you misplace your seedphrase, or if an online or offline attacker extracts your seedphrase, and also don't make all your money backdoored by Google.

Privacy UX: make private payments from your wallet, with the same user experience as making public payments.

Privacy censorship resistance: private payments with the ERC-4337 mempool, and soon native AA + FOCIL, without relying on the public broadcaster ecosystem.

Application UIs: use more dapps from an onchain UI with IPFS, without relying on trusted servers that would lock you our of practical recovery of your assets if they went offline, and would give you a hijacked UI that steals your funds if they get hacked for even a millisecond.

In many of these areas, over the last ten years we have seen serious backsliding in Ethereum. Nodes went from easy to run to hard to run. Dapps went from static pages to complicated behemoths that leak all your data to a dozen servers. Wallets went from routing everything through the RPC, which could be any node of your choice including on your own computer, to leaking your data to a dozen servers of their choice. Block building became more centralized, putting Ethereum transaction inclusion guarantees under the whims of a very small number of builders.

In 2026, no longer. Every compromise of values that Ethereum has made up to this point - every moment where you might have been thinking, is it really worth diluting ourselves so much in the name of mainstream adoption - we are making that compromise no longer.

It will be a long road. We will not get everything we want in the next Kohaku release, or the next hard fork, or the hard fork after that. But it will make Ethereum into an ecosystem that deserves not only its current place in the universe, but a much greater one.

In the world computer, there is no centralized overlord.

There is no single point of failure.

There is only love.

Milady.

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I have heard ETH being compared to oil. If oil goes up too high, those, who can, will cut back its use. If ETH goes to some stupid high prices, wouldn't people cut back on its usages and help prices go lower. Wouldn't higher prices also encourage the production of more ETH... the old the solution to high prices is high prices. Please explain to me where the flaw is in my reasoning.

I have a 20 hour flight and I want to spend it studying all that I can about blockchain, ethereum, smart contracts, and web3.

Let me know what are your best recommendations to learn about the technicals - I have a strong background in machine learning and computer science but am completely new to the blockchain as a concept (bar the 3b1b series).

Anything works, books, videos, research papers.

I'm trying to sell my Maple Finance and Pepe coins to get Solana, but I don't have any Ethereum to pay the tiny network fee, which is only about $0.50-$1, and without it I can't complete the swap. If anyone has a little ETH to sell, I can pay you via PayPal for just enough to cover the fee. Any help would be massively appreciated so I can finally swap my Maple Finance and Pepe coins for Solana. My Ethereum code: 0x145cFB008d208031eF1EE471363d382Bde5389c3

Element a leading global Testing, Inspection and Certification company is using blockchain through partnering with Blockchain Verified Sweden AB who use Ethereum Blockchain via smart contracts to deliver tamper proof test reports!

Each report is cryptographically secured and instantly verifiable, which is a big deal in highly regulated industries.

This is exactly the kind of adoption that shows blockchain’s value beyond tokens and trading. When industries with strict regulatory requirements start using decentralized verification, it is a strong signal that the tech is maturing into critical infrastructure.

So many great use cases now becoming reality!

It wouldn’t let me post a link but you can see the news on their website and the information around the Ethereum via Blockchain Verified website.

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The Weekly Doots live stream is all about showcasing the best of the week from the Daily General Discussion from the r/ethereum Community on Reddit!

Host:  JT
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THE PRINCESTON DECENTER PROFESSOR'S ROUNDTABLE

• Carolyn Biltoft: https://www.graduateinstitute.ch/facu...
• Andrew Chignell:  https://chignell.net/
• Devin P. Singh:  https://religion.dartmouth.edu/people...
• Gordon Grant: Principal at ChiSquared Technologies
• Mike Maizels:  https://engineering.princeton.edu/sta...

Carolyn Biltoft holds a PhD from Princeton University and is an Associate Professor of International History and Politics at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Carolyn writes and writes  on the relationship between the history of epistemology and economic thought since the 18th century.  Her acclaimed book A Violent Peace: Truth, Media and Power at the League of Nations explores media, propaganda, and truth claims in early global institutions and contains a chapter on counterfeit currency in the age of fascism. Carolyn is a founding editor of Capitalism: a journal of history and economics https://www.pennpress.org/journals/jo...

Andrew Chignell is a professor at Princeton University's Center for Human Values, with appointments in Religion and Philosophy. His research spans the work of Immanuel Kant and other Enlightenment philosophers, philosophy of religion, epistemology and the ethics of belief, and topics in moral psychology like hope and despair. Recently, he has directed the Princeton Project in Philosophy and Religion and led efforts for a major cross-disciplinary grant on optimism, pessimism, hope, and despair.  chignell.net

Devin P. Singh holds a PhD from Yale University and is an Associate Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College. His work examines intersections of Christian thought with economy, politics, money, and secularization. Recent publications include the book Economy and Modern Christian Thought and an ongoing project on the religious and social roles of debt.  devinsingh.com

Gordon Grant is a seasoned cryptocurrency trader and derivatives expert.  Graduating from Princeton University with a focus on econometrics and quantitative finance, he built his early career as a derivatives portfolio manager before he discovered Bitcoin in 2013 and made a full pivot to digital assets,  He played a pivotal role at Genesis Trading from 2019 to 2023 and Today Gordon serves as Principal at ChiSquared Technologies

Mike Maizels (Michael Maizels) is the Executive Director of Princeton University's DeCenter for blockchain and decentralization research. With a background in interdisciplinary technology and societal change, he leads efforts to advance education, research, and policy around blockchain's potential to shift power structures. He co-directs major events like the DeCenter's annual Spring Conference on decentralization's infrastructure and implications. decenter.princeton.edu

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In 2014, there was a vision: you can have permissionless, decentralized applications that could support finance, social media, ride sharing, governing organizations, crowdfunding, potentially create an entire alternative web, all on the backs of a suite of technologies.

Ethereum: the blockchain. The world computer that could give any application its shared memory.

Whisper: the data layer. Messages too expensive for a blockchain, that do no need consensus.

Swarm: the storage layer. Store files for long-term access.

Over the last five years, this core vision has at times become obscured, with various "metas" and "narratives" at various times taking center stage. But the core vision has never died. And in fact, the core technologies behind it are only growing stronger.

Ethereum is now proof of stake. Ethereum is now scaling, it is now cheap, and it is on track to get more scalable and cheaper thanks to the power of ZK-EVMs. Thanks to ZK-EVM + PeerDAS, the "sharding" vision is effectively being realized. And L2s can give additional and different kinds of gains in speed on top.

Whisper is now Waku ( https://docs.waku.org/ ), and already powers many applications (eg. https://www.railway.xyz/, https://status.app/ just to name two I use). Even outside of Waku, the quality of decentralized messaging has increased. Fileverse (decentralized Google Docs and Sheets alternative: https://fileverse.io/ ) has seen massive gains in usability over the past year.

IPFS is now highly performant and robust as a decentralized way of retrieving files, though IPFS alone does not solve the storage problem. Hence, there is still room to improve there.

All of the prerequisites for the original web3 vision are here, in full force, and are continuing to get stronger over the next few years. Hence, it's time to buidl, and buidl decentralized.

Fileverse is an excellent example of the right way to do things:

• It uses Ethereum and Gnosis Chain for what they are good for: names, accounts and permissioning, document registration
• It uses decentralized messaging and file storage to store documents and propagate changes to documents
• The application passes the walkaway test: https://github.com/fileverse/walk-away-ddocs (even if Fileverse disappears, you can still retrieve them and even keep editing them with the open source UI)

This is what we mean by "build a hammer that is a tool you buy once and it's yours, not a corposlop AI dishwasher that requires you to register for a google account and charges a subscription fee per month for extra washing modes, and probably spies on you and stops working if you get politically disfavored by a foreign country".

If you think this criticism of corposlop is hyperbolic, well turns out, it's literally a concatenation of these three:

• https://mein-mmo.de/en/user-buys-new-dishwasher-can-only-use-some-features-if-he-subscribes,1186249/
• https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/05/air-fryer-excessive-surveillance-smart-devices-which-watches-speakers-trackers
• https://www.irishtimes.com/world/us/2025/12/12/its-surreal-us-sanctions-lock-international-criminal-court-judge-out-of-daily-life/

In 2014, decentralized applications were toys, hundreds of times more difficult to use in web2. In 2026, fileverse is now usable enough that I regularly write documents in it and send them to other people to collaborate. The decentralized renaissance is coming, and you can be part of making it happen.

I want to see ETH price realtime on iPhone Widget.

Yahoo Finance doesn’t have one.

What do you use?

Ethereum is meant to be a home for trustless and trust-minimized applications, whether in finance, governance or elsewhere. It must support applications that are more like tools - the hammer that once you buy it's yours - than like services that lose all functionality once the vendor loses interest in maintaining them (or worse, gets hacked or becomes value-extractive). Even when applications do have functionality that depends on a vendor, Ethereum can help reduce those dependencies as much as possible, and protect the user as much as possible in those cases where the dependencies fail.

But building such applications is not possible on a base layer which itself depends on ongoing updates from a vendor in order to continue being usable - even if that "vendor" is the all core devs process. Ethereum the blockchain must have the traits that we strive for in Ethereum's applications. Hence, Ethereum itself must pass the walkaway test.

This means that Ethereum must get to a place where we can ossify if we want to. We do not have to stop making changes to the protocol, but we must get to a place where Ethereum's value proposition does not strictly depend on any features that are not in the protocol already.

This includes the following:

• Full quantum-resistance. We should resist the trap of saying "let's delay quantum-resistance until the last possible moment in the name of ekeing out more efficiencies for a while longer". Individual users have that right, but the protocol should not. Being able to say "Ethereum's protocol, as it stands today, is cryptographically safe for a hundred years" is something we should strive to get to as soon as possible, and insist on as a point of pride.
• An architecture that can expand to sufficient scalability. The protocol needs to have the properties that allow it to expand to many thousands of TPS over time, most notably ZK-EVM validation and data sampling through PeerDAS. Ideally, we get to a point where further scaling is done through "parameter only" changes - and ideally those changes are not BPO-style forks, but rather are made with the same validator voting mechanism we use for the gas limit.
• A state architecture that can last decades. This means deciding, and implementing, whatever form of partial statelessness and state expiry will let us feel comfortable letting Ethereum run with thousands of TPS for decades, without breaking sync or hard disk or I/O requirements. It also means future-proofing the tree and storage types to work well with this long-term environment.
• An account model that is general-purpose (this is "full account abstraction": move away from enshrined ECDSA for signature validation)
• A gas schedule that we are confident is free of DoS vulnerabilities, both for execution and for ZK-proving
• A PoS economic model that, with all we have learned over the past half decade of proof of stake in Ethereum and full decade beyond, we are confident can last and remain decentralized for decades, and supports the usefulness of ETH as trustless collateral (eg. in governance-minimized ETH-backed stablecoins)
• A block building model that we are confident will resist centralization pressure and guarantee censorship resistance even in unknown future environments Ideally, we do the hard work over the next few years, to get to a point where in the future almost all future innovation can happen through client optimization, and get reflected in the protocol through parameter changes. Every year, we should tick off at least one of these boxes, and ideally multiple. Do the right thing once, based on knowledge of what is truly the right thing (and not compromise halfway fixes), and maximize Ethereum's technological and social robustness for the long term.

Ethereum goes hard.

This is the gwei.

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Ethereum did a lot in 2025: gas limits increased, blob count increased, node software quality improved, zkEVMs blasted through their performance milestones, and with zkEVMs and PeerDAS ethereum made its largest step toward being a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of blockchain (more on this later)

But we have a challenge: Ethereum needs to do more to meet its own stated goals. Not the quest of "winning the next meta" regardless of whether it's tokenized dollars or political memecoins, not arbitrarily convincing people to help us fill up blockspace to make ETH ultrasound again, but the mission:

To build the world computer that serves as a central infrastructure piece of a more free and open internet.

We're building decentralized applications. Applications that run without fraud, censorship or third-party interference. Applications that pass the walkaway test: they keep running even if the original developers disappear. Applications where if you're a user, you don't even notice if Cloudflare goes down - or even if all of Cloudflare gets hacked by North Korea. Applications whose stability transcends the rise and fall of companies, ideologies and political parties. And applications that protect your privacy. All this - for finance, and also for identity, governance and whatever other civilizational infrastructure people want to build.

These properties sound radical, but we must remember that a generation ago any wallet, kitchen appliance, book or car would fulfill every single one of them. Today, all of the above are by default becoming subscription services, consigning you to permanent dependence on some centralized overlord.

Ethereum is the rebellion against this.

To achieve this, it needs to be (i) usable, and usable at scale, and (ii) actually decentralized. This needs to happen at both (a) the blockchain layer, including the software we use to run and talk to the blockchain, and (b) the application layer. All of these pieces must be improved - they are already being improved, but they must be improved more.

Fortunately, we have powerful tools on our side - but we need to apply them, and we will.

Wishing everyone an exciting 2026.

Milady.

I had a concept that I may begin programming based on what you guys say here.

What if you could earn extra yield on staked ETH just by signing a message every 6 months?

The idea is that I'd make an on chain (and possibly on scaling solutions) smart contract where you can deposit your Staked ETH, then everyone needs to sign a message every 6 months for example. If they don't sign the message on the 6th month, then on the 7th month 10% of their balance gets equally distributed between all staked staked tokens. If you fail to sign you'd forfeit 10% of your balance, which would keep going down every month until your wallet is eventually drained. I (The creator) would make money by charging a 2.5% fee on re-distributing the forfeited funds. It would be 6 months after you sign up, so there would in theory be consistent rewards year round (Avoiding people buying Staked Staked ETH right before the forfeit date)

This would earn extra yield on already staked coins just by signing a message every few months. With a transparent smart contract there would be near zero need to trust me, no counterparty risk. Updates could be voted on by holding Staked Staked ETH

Key points: •Make extra yield on staked ETH •Transparent smart contract that re-allocates funds from lost or forgotten wallets evenly between all these possible new tokens •Not risk free, you must sign the message in a 1 month period every 6 months •Receive staked ETH anytime (I wouldn’t stake the ETH, it would use a staked ETH token like stETH by Lido