In brief

• Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said Ethereum has “solved” the blockchain trilemma of decentralization, security and scalability.
• Buterin cited live mainnet upgrades and near-ready ZK-EVMs as solutions.
• The shift underpins Ethereum’s long-term plan to scale throughput without centralizing the network.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has said the network has effectively solved blockchain’s long-standing “trilemma,” arguing that recent upgrades have transformed Ethereum into a “fundamentally new and more powerful kind of decentralized network” capable of achieving security, decentralization and scalability.

“Now, Ethereum with PeerDAS (2025) and ZK-EVMs (expect small portions of the network using it in 2026), we get: decentralized, consensus and high bandwidth,” he tweeted Saturday, referring to Peer-to-Peer Data Availability Sampling and Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines.

Now that ZKEVMs are at alpha stage (production-quality performance, remaining work is safety) and PeerDAS is live on mainnet, it's time to talk more about what this combination means for Ethereum.

These are not minor improvements; they are shifting Ethereum into being a…

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) January 3, 2026

“The trilemma has been solved - not on paper, but with live running code, of which one half (data availability sampling) is on mainnet today, and the other half (ZK-EVMs) is production-quality on performance today - safety is what remains.”

The claims come as Ethereum continues to navigate market volatility following last month's Fusaka upgrade. ETH is currently trading at $3,185, up 1.4% over the past 24 hours but about 36% below its peak of $4,946.05 reached on August 24, 2025, according to CoinGecko data.

On prediction market Myriad, owned by Decrypt's parent company Dastan, sentiment is cautiously optimistic. Users place a 56% chance on Ethereum's next move taking it to $4,000 rather than $2,500.

What is the blockchain trilemma?

The blockchain trilemma refers to a belief thatblockchain networks can optimize for only two of the three core properties of decentralization, security and scalability at once. Previously, efforts to increase transaction throughput have required sacrificing decentralization, while highly decentralized networks have struggled to scale without compromising performance or costs.

Buterin contrasted Ethereum’s latest technical progress with that of earlier distributed networks. He compared BitTorrent, launched in 2000, as highly decentralized with massive total bandwidth but no shared consensus, and Bitcoin, introduced in 2009, as decentralized and secure but limited in bandwidth because computation on the network is replicated rather than distributed.

Ethereum’s roadmap seeks to overcome this constraint by separating data availability, execution and validation across the network.

A central component of this roadmap is PeerDAS, which Buterin has highlighted as a key feature of the Fusaka upgrade last month. PeerDAS allows nodes to verify that transaction data exists without downloading it in full by sampling small portions of data that can be reconstructed using erasure coding.

The approach reduces the computational and storage burden on validators, lowers the barrier to running a node and is expected to significantly increase Ethereum’s throughput, with a target of up to 12,000 transactions per second by 2026.

Ethereum’s future roadmap

Looking ahead, Buterin said the full scope of Ethereum’s scaling strategy will roll out over several years. In 2026, he expects large gas limit increases that do not depend on ZK-EVMs, alongside the first opportunities to run a ZK-EVM node.

Between 2026 and 2028, further changes are expected, including gas repricings, updates to Ethereum’s state structure, and moving execution payloads into data blobs to make higher gas limits safer. From 2027 to 2030, Buterin said the network could see additional major gas limit increases as ZK-EVMs become the primary method for validating blocks.

Buterin also highlighted the potential of distributed block building. "A long-term ideal holy grail is to get to a future where the full block is never constituted in one single place," he said. "This will not be necessary for a long time, but IMO it is worth striving for us at least have the capability to do that.”

“Even before that point, we want the meaningful authority in block building to be as distributed as possible,” Buterin wrote, adding that it can be done either in-protocol or out-of-protocol with distributed builder marketplaces. "This reduces risk of centralized interference with real-time transaction inclusion, AND it creates a better environment for geographical fairness,” he explained.

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