Vitalik Buterin announces strategic shift of Ethereum for 2026: targeted optimization

Source: PortaldoBitcoin Original Title: Vitalik Buterin says what to expect from Ethereum by 2026 Original Link: Ethereum will undergo a significant change in its strategy in 2026, according to its co-founder Vitalik Buterin. In a series of posts on X, Buterin stated that the network is ready to move past the phase of “scaling everything at once” and enter a new cycle focused on “targeted optimization.”

The proposal, according to him, is to abandon broad adjustments that impact multiple parts of the infrastructure and adopt more specific interventions with the aim of enhancing the overall performance of the blockchain without overloading the validators.

The main measure suggested by Buterin is to increase the gas limit of the network fivefold, while also raising the cost of operations considered heavier for on-chain processing by five times.

Expect continued growth but more targeted / less uniform growth for next year.

eg. one possible future is: 5x gas limit increase together with 5x gas cost increase for operations that are relatively inefficient to process

The model creates a sort of reallocation of incentives. Instead of simply releasing more capacity and allowing inefficient operations to consume resources disproportionately, Ethereum would allow greater throughput while penalizing activities that overload the nodes.

Among the operations that would incur this increase in cost are the creation of new storage slots via SSTORE, some other variants of SSTORE itself, pre-compiled contracts (excluding elliptic curve calculations), CALLs for large contracts, complex arithmetic instructions, and calldata.

The idea is to discourage technical standards that degrade performance and force developers and protocols to adopt more efficient practices.

In search of Ethereum's full potential

Buterin argues that, after years of primarily focusing on scalability, the ecosystem is mature enough to adjust the details that still limit the total processing of the network. With a higher gas limit, throughput would increase significantly, allowing for more transactions per block and more space for rollups, without this turning into excessive pressure for the validators.

At the same time, the selective increase in costs reduces the risk that we need to deal with very heavy operations, which could bring unwanted centralization.

The co-founder of Ethereum also highlighted that the change is part of a broader debate within the network's core developers, who are seeking to increase its efficiency and strengthen its resilience before the next steps of the roadmap, such as improvements to the consensus protocol and advancements in rollup architecture.

The discussion takes place at a time when the ecosystem faces increasing competition from high-performance blockchains, and the Ethereum team is trying to balance scalability, security, and decentralization, a historically difficult tripod to harmonize.

Although there is still no fixed schedule, Buterin indicated that he expects to see this new model of “targeted optimization” begin to be implemented as early as next year, paving the way for a more efficient, predictable Ethereum capable of absorbing increased demand without sacrificing its technical foundation.