[DigitalToday reporter Chi-gyu Hwang] Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin (비탈릭 부테린) said in a recent post that 2026 should be made the year to “reclaim computational self-sovereignty.” He said the shift should apply beyond the blockchain industry and across digital society, stressing the need to reduce the amount of data entrusted to centralised services.

Buterin said he sharply increased his use of decentralised tools from 2025. He said he mainly uses Fileverse, an encrypted decentralised document platform, and uses Signal as his default messenger.

As 2026 begins, he said he replaced Google Maps with OpenStreetMap and Gmail with ProtonMail. He added that the ideal environment is to directly use communication tools that default to end-to-end encryption.

He said he continues to experiment with building local large language models, but problems with the “last mile” of user experience and power consumption remain obstacles.

As some critics said it is unrealistic to choose tools used by only a few instead of mainstream services, Buterin countered that such thinking led to failures of centralised systems such as Liberty Reserve in the past. He said, “The mindset of chasing only tools everyone uses is itself the problem,” and said people should be wary of blind dependence on centralised products that can siphon user data and expose it to multiple powers.