Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said that with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (ZK-EVM) transitioning into production use, the network has effectively “solved” the blockchain trilemma of decentralization, consensus, and high bandwidth, arguing that the missing elements are now either live on the mainnet or within reach.
In a post published on X on January 3, Buterin framed the moment around two technical developments. PeerDAS and ZK-EVM, which are currently live on the Ethereum mainnet, are in “alpha stage” with “production quality performance” and “the remaining operations are safe,” he explained.
“This is not a minor improvement; it is fundamentally transforming Ethereum into a new, more powerful decentralized network,” Buterin wrote. “To find out why, let’s look at the two main types of P2P networks.”
Buterin drew a contrast between early peer-to-peer systems that can scale throughput but lack consensus on shared state, and blockchains that achieve strong consensus but pay for it with limited bandwidth. He pointed to BitTorrent as a decentralized distribution model without consensus, and Bitcoin as a decentralized and consensus model that keeps bandwidth low because “the work is replicated rather than 'distributed' in the sense that it is split.”
Ethereum will solve the blockchain trilemma
According to Buterin, Ethereum is entering the third category. “Now with Ethereum, with PeerDAS (2025) and ZK-EVM (part of the network expected to use it in 2026), we can achieve decentralization, consensus and high bandwidth,” he said. “The trilemma has been solved through real executable code, not paper. Half of them (Data Availability Sampling) are currently on mainnet and the other half (ZK-EVM) is currently production quality in terms of performance. Safety remains.”
Buterin touted this as the culmination of a multi-year roadmap rather than a sudden breakthrough. He described it as a “10-year journey,” pointing to early data availability sampling studies and noting that the ZK-EVM effort began around 2020. The crux of his argument is that while data availability sampling changes what a decentralized network can securely publish and verify at scale, ZK-EVM changes how nodes verify their execution, shifting verification to proof-based verification as the technology matures.
Buterin laid out a rough timeline for how he expects the vision to unfold over the next four years. In 2026, he expects “massive gas limit increases that don’t rely on ZKEVM” related to BAL and ePBS, along with the first opportunity to run ZK-EVM nodes.
From 2026 to 2028, he foresees a series of changes, gas price adjustments, state restructuring, moving execution payloads to blobs, and other steps aimed at making higher gas limits safe. He expects “gas limits to increase significantly further” between 2027 and 2030, with ZK-EVM becoming “the primary method of validating blocks on the network.”
He also flagged distributed block building, which he called the “third piece” of the puzzle. He wrote that the long-term goal is “a world where entire blocks are never organized in one place,” but emphasized that “it won’t be necessary for a long time.” In the short term, the focus will be on distributing “meaningful authority to build blocks,” either through in-protocol mechanisms (he cites FOCIL extensions as the main transaction channel) or through external-protocol systems such as a decentralized builder marketplace.
For Buterin, block-building decentralization is not just an engineering preference, but a matter of risk and fairness. He argued that this would reduce the likelihood of “centralized interference with the inclusion of real-time transactions” while creating “a better environment for geographic fairness.”
At press time, ETH was trading at $3,164.
Featured image from YouTube, chart from TradingView.com
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