Key takeaway: Inflection point for the Ethereum ecosystem in 2026

In the first two months of 2026, the Ethereum community is facing a time of deep reflection on the essential identity of the network beyond price or technology upgrades. While Vitalik Buterin's statement, "You are not scaling Ethereum," set off alarm bells throughout the ecosystem, rival network Solana began targeting the institutional market by launching a developer platform targeting global financial institutions such as Mastercard and Western Union.

Why This Matters: A New Phase in Blockchain Infrastructure Competition

Ethereum has been pursuing its vision of becoming an ‘invisible infrastructure’. The idea was that neobanks would onboard millions of users by abstracting away the complexity of wallets and gas fees, and Ethereum would run a new financial stack underneath. ‘Proto-danksharding’, introduced in the 2024 Dencun upgrade, gave strength to this vision by significantly lowering the fees of layer 2 networks.

However, Buterin's remarks poured cold water on the optimism surrounding Layer 2 (L2) networks. Rollup networks have grown explosively and fees have fallen, but fundamental questions have been raised about whether this is ‘consistent scaling’.

Meanwhile, the Solana Foundation unveiled the ‘Solana Developer Platform (SDP)’ aimed at the institutional market. The platform integrates artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex, and bundles services from more than 20 infrastructure providers into a single interface. The issuance module that supports tokenized deposits, stablecoins, and tokenization of real assets and the payment module that supports fiat currency and stablecoin payments were released first, and the trading module is scheduled to be added in late 2026.

When did this trend begin: History of the blockchain scaling debate

Ethereum's scaling debate began in earnest in 2017 when the network was paralyzed due to the CryptoKitties incident. Afterwards, the problem of skyrocketing gas fees recurred through the DeFi summer of 2020 and the NFT boom in 2021, and the Ethereum community proposed a layer 2 solution as an alternative.

Major changes continued, such as the conversion to proof-of-stake (PoS) through 'The Merge' in 2022 and the Denkun upgrade in 2024, but the fragmentation of the layer 2 network and liquidity distribution issues have emerged as new challenges. In November 2025, the decentralized exchange protocol Balancer suffered hacking damage worth approximately $110 million, and Balancer Labs, which developed it, eventually decided to shut down. This was an incident that once again highlighted the security vulnerabilities of the DeFi ecosystem.

Future outlook [AI analysis]

The strategic directions of Ethereum and Solana show a sharp contrast. While Ethereum needs to prioritize decentralization and security and reorganize rollup-oriented scaling, Solana is accelerating the construction of an institution-friendly infrastructure.

As the development of quantum computing and AI technology accelerates, it is highly likely that a fundamental reexamination of the security paradigm of blockchain networks will be inevitable. In particular, the roadmap for introducing post-quantum cryptography is expected to be a key variable that determines future competitiveness.

As the adoption of blockchain by institutional investors expands, securing regulatory clarity and proving infrastructure stability are expected to be decisive factors in network selection. As the Balancer incident shows, there are bound to be limits to the inflow of large-scale institutional funds without strengthening the security of DeFi protocols.