Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin rang in 2026 by switching his X profile image back to a Milady-style avatar and pairing it with a manifesto-like post that re-centers Ethereum’s identity around a single, old-school ambition: becoming “the world computer” for an open internet.“Welcome to 2026! Milady is back,” Buterin wrote, before ticking through what he framed as Ethereum’s 2025 progress: higher gas limits, a larger blob count, better node software quality, and zkEVMs hitting major performance milestones. He also argued that “with zkEVMs and PeerDAS ethereum made its largest step toward being a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of blockchain.”Ethereum Must Deliver The World ComputerBut the post’s center of gravity wasn’t a victory lap. It was a warning that the network is still falling short of its own stated goals and that chasing whatever narrative is currently printing attention is not the point.Buterin drew a bright line between Ethereum’s long-term mission and trend-driven incentives that often dominate crypto cycles. “Ethereum needs to do more to meet its own stated goals,” he wrote. “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.”From there, he offered a description of what “world computer” should mean in practice: decentralized applications that can’t be quietly altered or shut off, and that remain usable even when the companies and infrastructure most users take for granted fail.“We’re building decentralized applications. Applications that run without fraud, censorship or third-party interference,” he wrote. “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.”Buterin extended that same set of expectations beyond finance, explicitly name-checking identity, governance, and “whatever other civilizational infrastructure people want to build,” and he emphasized privacy as a core property rather than a nice-to-have.A notable thread in the post is that Buterin refuses to treat usability-at-scale and decentralization as a trade-off Ethereum can punt on. “To achieve this, it needs to be (i) usable, and usable at scale, and (ii) actually decentralized,” he wrote, arguing those requirements apply both to the base layer—“including the software we use to run and talk to the blockchain” and to the application layer.That framing implicitly puts pressure on multiple constituencies at once: core protocol work, client diversity and quality, infrastructure that doesn’t centralize around a few providers, and dapp architectures that can survive developer abandonment while still meeting user expectations.Buterin closed on a note of resolve rather than specifics, saying Ethereum has “powerful tools” but needs to apply them more aggressively. “All of these pieces must be improved — they are already being improved, but they must be improved more,” he wrote. “Fortunately, we have powerful tools on our side — but we need to apply them, and we will.”At press time, ETH traded at $3,030.