Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin claims Ethereum has “solved” one of the biggest challenges in crypto: the blockchain trilemma.
In a Saturday X post, Buterin emphasized the potential of peer data availability sampling (PeerDAS) and Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines (ZK-EVMs), noting that these two upgrades are making Ethereum become “a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of decentralized network.”
“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 said, adding:
“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.”
PeerDas is a scalability enhancement introduced in the Fusaka upgrade in December that enables Ethereum to handle significantly more data.
Meanwhile, ZKEVMs, which have been around for a while, are virtual machines compatible with both ZK proofs and the existing Ethereum virtual machine.
The Ethereum co-founder said that ZKEVMs are still in their “alpha stage” as they are performance-ready but require additional security improvements. He has given a four-year timeline for ZKEVMs to be fully utilized and operating within Ethereum sufficiently.
Once this happens, Buterin says the vision of solving the trilemma will be officially realized.
“Over the next ~4 years, expect to see the full extent of this vision roll out: * In 2026, large non-ZKEVM-dependent gas limit increases due to BALs and ePBS, and we’ll see the first opportunities to run a ZKEVM node*,” he said.
“In 2026-28, gas repricings, changes to state structure, exec payload going into blobs, and other adjustments to make higher gas limits safe * In 2027-30, large further gas limit increases, as ZKEVM becomes the primary way to validate blocks on the network,” he added.
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Ethereum took 10 years to solve the trilemma
Buterin said that it has taken 10 years of solid work to get Ethereum to the level of being able to solve the trilemma, as he pointed to his first post on solving data-availability problems back in April 2017.
“This was a 10-year journey […] but it’s finally here,” he said.
The blockchain trilemma refers to the complexity of building a blockchain network that sufficiently achieves decentralization, security and scalability simultaneously without any one pillar hampering the other.
Generally, most blockchains are forced to prioritize one or two of these pillars, such as speed and security, in their early stages as they gradually work to get a balance in all three.
In his post, Buterin pointed to Bitcoin as an example, noting that the network was designed to be “highly decentralized” and secure, but suffers from scalability.
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