Vitalik Buterin states Ethereum resolved blockchain’s trilemma by zero-knowledge EVMs and PeerDAS technology, allowing decentralization, consensus, and excessive bandwidth at the same time after a decade of development.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin announced that the network has ultimately cracked blockchain’s fundamental trilemma by the combination of zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines and PeerDAS technology now running on mainnet.
The significant development signifies the culmination of a decade-long technical journey that started with Buterin’s first data accessibility sampling commit in 2015 and initial ZKEVM development around 2020.
“These are not small improvements; they’re transferring Ethereum into being a basically new and more effective type of decentralized community,” Buterin wrote in a publish on X, explaining how the protocol now provides decentralization, consensus, and high bandwidth at the same time, a feat formerly regarded impossible.
Technical Milestone Reshapes Blockchain Architecture
Buterin described that initial peer-to-peer networks confronted stark obstacles, with BitTorrent providing big bandwidth and decentralization however no consensus mechanism.
At the same time, Bitcoin obtained decentralization and consensus at the cost of extraordinarily low throughput because of duplicated instead of allotted work.
Ethereum’s new architecture breaks this pattern by dividing computational work throughout nodes while keeping cryptographic verification of all state transitions.
ZKEVMs have accomplished manufacturing-quality overall performance, with demonstrating times dropping from 16-minutes to 16-seconds and costs falling 45-fold, with 99% of Ethereum blocks now demonstrable in under 10 seconds on focused hardware.
In the meantime, PeerDAS allows nodes to affirm data accessibility by testing small quantities in preference to downloading whole blocks, significantly increasing throughput without giving up decentralization.
The Ethereum Foundation set a safety-first roadmap needing groups to obtain 128-bit provable safety by the end of 2026, with intermediate milestones at a 100-bit safety by May 2026 and compulsory incorporation with the soundcalc security evaluation of tool by February.
“If an attacker can create a proof, they can create anything: mint tokens from nothing, rewrite state, steal funds,” the foundation warned in December, highlighting that performance profits cannot negotiate cryptographic honesty.
George Kadianakis from the foundation’s cryptography team burdened the importance of securing architectures earlier than they turn out to be shifting targets.
“Once teams have hit these objectives and zkVM architectures stabilize, the formal verification work we’ve been investing in can attain its complete potential,” he wrote, remarking that latest advances in small polynomial commitment schemes like WHIR and techniques such as JaggedPCS now make formidable protection targets attainable.
Rollout Timeline Extends By 2030
Buterin highlighted a 4-year deployment arrangement starting with huge non-ZKEVM-based gas restrict will rise in 2026 by Balance Attack Limits and maintained Proposer-Builder Separation, along the first opportunities to run ZKEVM nodes.
Between 2026 and 2028, developers will enforce gas repricing, state structure changes, and the migration of execution payloads into blobs to safely guide better throughput.
By 2027 via 2030, Buterin anticipates ZKEVM validation to be a main block verification technique as gas limits growth considerably beyond present capacity.
The plan also consists distributed block constructing as a third vital element, with Buterin explaining “long-term ideal holy grail” in which complete blocks are never concentrated in a single area, decreasing centralized interference dangers and improving geographic equity.
While celebrating technical progress, Buterin warned in a separate January 1 post that Ethereum must oppose the compulsion to get “fleeting trends” like tokenized dollars or political memecoins.
“Ethereum wishes to do more to satisfy its own stated targets,” he wrote, calling for applications that bypass the “walkaway test” through continuing to function even if original developers disappear and stay solid irrespective of external disruptions, which includes hypothetical scenarios like Cloudflare being compromised by state actors.
The co-founder also cautioned separately last month that the protocol complexity undermines trustlessness via restricting the number of people who can understand the system end-to-end.
“If most five people can understand how your privacy protocol operates, you haven’t accomplished trustlessness, you’ve simply changed who you consider,” privacy network INTMAX said, echoing Buterin’s concern that developing technical abstractions threat concentrating functional control among experts.
Institutional adoption maintains to increase no matter these architectural demanding situations, with Ethereum’s total value locked projected to rise tenfold in 2026.
Already, JPMorgan is launching a $100 million tokenized money-market fund on Ethereum, and Deutsche Bank is developing a Layer 2 using ZKsync technology, alongside 24 financial institution trying out asset tokenization below Singapore’s regulatory framework.
