Vitalik Buterin: 2026 Will Be the Year of Restoring Digital Sovereignty

• Ethereum co-founder urged reducing reliance on centralized services and developing users’ digital sovereignty.
• Buterin is convinced that 2026 should be a pivotal year for regaining control over data and computing.
• Among the tools he uses are Fileverse, Signal, SimpleX, Session, OpenStreetMap, and more.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said that 2026 should be a turning point in restoring users’ digital sovereignty — not only in the blockchain space, but also in the broader context of computing, communications, and data work. 

According to him, “2026 is the year we take back lost ground in computing self-sovereignty,” and this task goes far beyond the crypto industry.

Buterin said that back in 2025 he significantly revised the software stack he uses every day. In particular, he “almost completely switched to Fileverse” — an open-source solution for encrypted, decentralized documents — and also made Signal his primary messenger, moving away from Telegram. 

In addition, he installed SimpleX and Session as alternative tools for private communication.

In 2026, these changes continued, according to Buterin. He replaced Google Maps with OpenStreetMap and Organic Maps, calling the latter “the best mobile app” that is not only open, but also “privacy-preserving,” since it runs locally and reduces the number of services that know a user’s physical location. 

He also switched from Gmail to ProtonMail, noting that “though ultimately, the best thing is to use proper encrypted messengers outright.”

Buterin also paid significant attention to local large language models (LLMs). He noted that he is actively exploring the possibilities of running artificial intelligence (AI) locally, but acknowledged that the “last mile” of integration remains problematic. 

In his view, there are many powerful local models, including CPU-based and phone-compatible ones, but they lack convenient integration and a unified user interface. 

He noted that there is still no “good Google Translate equivalent” that works with local LLMs, as well as no solutions with a convenient user experience (UX) for transcription, audio input, or searching through personal documents. 

Separately, he emphasized that he does not want to keep Ollama running all the time due to high energy consumption.

At the same time, Buterin acknowledged significant progress in this area, noting that just a year ago “most of the local models did not yet exist.” Ideally, he believes, the ecosystem should move as far as possible toward local LLMs, using specialized improved models to compensate for the small number of parameters. 

For more resource-intensive scenarios, he suggested combining several approaches: paying for queries via ZK proofs, using trusted execution environments (TEE), locally filtering requests, and removing sensitive data before sending queries to large models. 

In the long term, he sees an extremely efficient fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) as the ideal solution.

In conclusion, Buterin stressed that “sending all your data to third party centralized services is unnecessary,” since the industry already has tools for a much more private approach. In his view, these tools should not only be developed, but also used much more actively.

As a reminder, Buterin emphasized the importance of prioritizing decentralized social networks and recalled his previous statements on the matter. Earlier, he said he intends to fully switch to decentralized social networks in 2026, criticizing crypto-social projects for a speculative tokenization model and calling for competition to be developed through a shared decentralized data layer and new communication formats.