Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that the long-standing “Blockchain Trilemma” in the blockchain industry has actually been solved. He emphasized that after recent upgrades, Ethereum has undergone a transformation to become a “brand new, more powerful decentralized network” capable of simultaneously balancing security, decentralization, and scalability.
Vitalik Buterin posted on social platform X: “Now, with PeerDAS introduced in 2025 and ZK-EVMs partially adopted in 2026, Ethereum will achieve: decentralization, consensus mechanism, and high bandwidth.” He further explained:
The Trilemma has been solved—not just talk, but through actual running code. One half (Data Availability Sampling) is already live on the mainnet, and the other half (ZK-EVM, Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine) has reached production-level performance. The remaining piece is security.
Despite technical good news, the price of ETH has continued to fluctuate following last month’s Fusaka upgrade. As of press time, ETH is trading at approximately $3,237, up 2.6% in a single day, but still about 34.5% below the all-time high of $4,946.05 set in August last year.
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 so-called “Blockchain Trilemma” refers to the difficulty in designing a blockchain that can simultaneously achieve the three core elements: “decentralization,” “security,” and “scalability.” Usually, one must sacrifice one of these aspects.
For example, to increase transaction speed (scalability), decentralization often has to be compromised; conversely, highly decentralized networks tend to struggle with performance or high costs.
Vitalik Buterin compared Ethereum’s technological progress with early decentralized networks:
♦ BitTorrent (2000): Highly decentralized with enormous bandwidth but lacked a “consensus mechanism”;
♦ Bitcoin (2009): Decentralized and secure, but because network computations are “repetitive execution” rather than “distributed,” bandwidth (transaction throughput) is limited.
To break the deadlock, Ethereum’s roadmap layers data availability, execution, and verification. The core puzzle is PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling), which Vitalik Buterin has repeatedly highlighted, and was a key feature of last month’s Fusaka upgrade.
PeerDAS works by allowing nodes to verify transaction data by sampling only a small amount of data, without downloading the entire block. This significantly lowers the barrier for validators, enabling more people to run nodes, with the goal of reaching 12,000 transactions per second (TPS) on Ethereum by 2026.
Looking ahead, Vitalik Buterin painted an ambitious scalability blueprint:
♦ 2026: Significantly increase the gas limit without relying on ZK-EVM, and also open the first ZK-EVM node operations.
♦ 2026 to 2028: Introduce gas re-pricing, update Ethereum’s state structure, and move execution load into Blobs to ensure security under higher gas limits.
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