Ether fi CEO and Ethereum Foundation co-director made important evaluations after we entered 2026. The current market outlooks of these two key figures are worth taking a look at as they contain more notable readings from different analysts or experts. So what do Tomasz and Mike say?
Ethereum Foundation 2026
Nethermind founder and Ethereum Foundation co-director Tomasz Kajetan Staiczak touched upon the role of Ethereum in the transition of traditional finance to blockchain in his recent interview. This is exactly the most important event for the future of Ethereum and it has been expected for years. At this point today, trillion-dollar asset managers and banks worth hundreds of billions of dollars are doing what was once dreamed of on the Ethereum network.
Ethereum Foundation Evaluating cross-layer compatibility strategies, as well as current goals such as scalability and user experience, Tomasz also talked about the integration of artificial intelligence into the Ethereum network and the new technical standards needed in this field.
In the new year, we will probably see Ethereum take more concrete steps on the AI side on the issues Tomasz mentioned. Web3 and AI are two areas that need each other.
- Trust and Authentication Layer: With the rise of “fake realities” and manufactured content in the AI world, Web3 offers an indispensable layer of security and defense for verifying data and preserving authenticity at the enterprise level.
- Finance Agents and the Economy: AI agents represent the next transformation of automation, and it is possible for Web3-based services to be run by AI agents. Ethereum, on the other hand, is the center of Web3, so it needs to do a lot more.
- Standards (ERC-8800004): The decentralized AI team at the Ethereum Foundation is developing standards such as ERC-8804 for agents to record their identities, establish reputations, and verify each other’s work.
Tomasz even envisions a governance model where suggestions are generated by AI and verified by AI, where competition takes place on ideas at a “proof-of-work” level. Since he said these both as a major building block of the network’s core developer team and as Co-Director of the Ethereum Foundation, it is possible that investors’ hopes for the ETH price future will increase.
ERC-80004 standard It was developed by a dAI team of the Ethereum Foundation. This standard even caught the attention of Google, and in the scenario where we see Ethereum as a verification layer being part of the solution, we can say that we have truly moved to the next phase of the internet and crypto is at the center of it.
Ethereum Growth in 2026
Ether fi Beyond last year’s institutional growth, Ethereum will be driven by crypto-based neobanks this year, CEO Mike Silagadze said. Last year, ETH jumped to the ATH level with the successive birth of ETFs and especially ETH reserve companies in June. The companies’ commitments were that they would accumulate up to $30 billion in ETH, but they could not accumulate that much. ETHZilla Examples such as: The company even had to sell ETH when its shares became worthless due to the market crash. BitMine continues to make purchases every week.
Coming back to Mike, he thinks Ethereum will be the network that gets the lion’s share of this, especially as stablecoins transform into ever more powerful building blocks of global finance. So, beyond price speculation, Ethereum will move to its next stage with integration into global capital.
“My belief is that adoption will be largely driven by these neobank type players.”
In other words, we will see a new era in which crypto forms the basis of tokenized stocks and accessible banking services, beyond the gambling logic evolved by investors, and 2026 will be the year when its foundation is strengthened.
