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.
Like all transformative inventions, AI is neither salvation nor doom in itself; it is a mirror. It reflects the intentions of those who wield it, and it is we who determine whether it serves destruction or human flourishing.
And we finalized!
Happy merge all. This is a big moment for the Ethereum ecosystem. Everyone who helped make the merge happen should feel very proud today.
Introducing a16z’s 2022 State of Crypto Report
A lot has changed since we started investing in crypto nearly a decade ago.
Here are 5 key takeaways from the a16z crypto web3 industry survey and data analysis by @darenmatsuoka, @eddylazzarin, @cdixon & @rhackett ⬇️
자주 인용하는 슬라이드 중 하나.
1. 크립토의 가격 상승은 대중의 관심을 이끌고
2. 대중의 관심으로부터 새로운 아이디어가 나오고
3. 새로운 아이디어는 크립토 스타트업/프로젝트를 낳으며
4. 이는 다시 크립토의 가격 상승을 이끈다.
우리는 지금 4→1 사이클에 있음.
함께 만들어보시죠.
크립토의 1일은 대기업의 1년.
인력, 자본 등의 리소스가 유입되는 속도,
24/7 멈추지 않고 돌아가는 거래 속도와 볼륨 등 때문.
따라서 얼터너티브 코인을 노후까지 쥐고 있겠다는 포트폴리오 구성은 아직 시기상조.
각 상승장에 주목받았던 알트 중 대다수가 사라졌음으로 유추 가능한 영역임.