Ethereum’s Missing Piece for true “Moneyness” Qualities: What Vitalik Buterin Is Focused On

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has detailed the short-term upgrades aimed at bringing native privacy to the base layer after a public exchange on X put the spotlight back on ether’s missing features.

The conversation started when a user questioned why Ethereum still sits around $2,000 after the Merge, staking, layer-2 rollouts, and spot ETF approvals.

Privacy as the Missing Value Driver

Another user replied that native privacy is the feature most likely to give ether real “moneyness” qualities. The post argued that ETH utility value would “literally jump overnight” once base-layer privacy ships. The same user added that L1 privacy could also drive a surge in mainnet fees.

Buterin jumped into the thread with a short list of upgrades already in active development, extending the cypherpunk reset he outlined in January.

What These Ethereum Wallet Upgrades Mean

Vitalik Buterin is focused on several parallel improvements for Ethereum wallets, including account abstraction, keyed nonces, and Kohaku.

Account abstraction would make wallets easier to use and more flexible, while also making private transfers harder to censor. Keyed nonces would let users handle transactions in parallel instead of forcing everything into one long sequence. Kohaku is a privacy tool that hides which wallet data a service is looking up, making it harder for providers to track which addresses users are checking.

What This Could Mean for Ethereum

Together, the upgrades aim to bake privacy into everyday flows rather than confine it to standalone mixers. Account abstraction and FOCIL are both targeted for the planned Hegota hard fork in the second half of 2026.

Buterin’s privacy push extends beyond Ethereum, with a recent donation to Zcash developer Shielded Labs signaling support across ecosystems. For ether holders, the question is whether stronger privacy translates into measurable demand. Wintermute recently called ETH the “wrong asset for macro,” and the ETH/BTC ratio touched a 10-month low. A working privacy stack could test that view by drawing more activity back to mainnet.