Vitalik Buterin labels 2026 the year of self-sovereign tech

In a post on X on Friday, Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin called 2026 “the year we take back lost ground in computing self-sovereignty” and outlined steps to reduce reliance on centralized services.

He pointed to two changes he made last year: moving almost entirely to Fileverse, an open-source decentralized document platform, and switching fully to Signal as his primary messaging app.

Signal provides default end-to-end encryption for one-to-one and group chats and stores only limited metadata, such as account creation time or last connection date. Telegram offers optional secret chats with end-to-end encryption; its standard chats and related metadata are stored on company servers – a model that has faced increasing law-enforcement data requests in countries including France.

For 2026, Buterin replaced Google Maps with OpenStreetMap data via the OrganicMaps app and moved his email from Gmail to Proton Mail. He wrote that he is prioritizing decentralized social platforms and experimenting with running large language models directly on his devices, arguing that sending all data to third-party AI services is “unnecessary” as consumer hardware improves.

He noted that better interfaces, integrations, and efficiency are still needed before local models can become the default, though he sees “huge progress” compared with a year earlier.

Privacy advocates have echoed the push toward local processing. Educator Naomi Brockwell has encouraged running AI models on personal devices to keep prompts and documents off external servers, calling it “the most private way to use AI without sending prompts or documents to external servers.”

The discussion comes amid ongoing debate in the European Union over access to private communications and metadata. Early versions of the proposed Chat Control framework included scanning content before encryption to detect abusive material, prompting warnings from civil-liberties groups and technologists that client-side scanning could undermine trust in encrypted apps.

Buterin framed his shift as part of a broader plan to “take back lost ground in computing self-sovereignty” and urged users to replace everyday apps with encrypted, open-source, and local alternatives.