Ethereum Is Decentralized. Your Access Isn’t.

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Speaker: Jason Chaskin

Type: Talk

Expertise: No prior knowledge

Event: Devcon

Date: Nov 2026

Ethereum’s protocol can be decentralized, secure, and credibly neutral while most users never interact with it directly. Their path runs through wallets, RPCs, frontends, relays, indexers, identity systems, and increasingly AI agents, any of which can reintroduce trust, censorship, surveillance, or lock-in. This talk starts with Moxie Marlinspike’s 2022 critique of Web3 and asks how much has actually changed. It then maps the user boundary where Ethereum’s guarantees still break and introduces the work being done within the Ethereum Foundation’s new Access Layer: private and verifiable reads, censorship-resistant transaction submission, safer account interfaces, privacy-preserving identity, bounded delegation, and credible fallback and exit paths. Attendees will leave with a framework for understanding Ethereum’s remaining access-layer dependencies, the technologies being developed to remove them, and what a genuinely self-sovereign Ethereum experience could look like.