Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said new privacy and data processing technologies have effectively addressed blockchain’s long-standing scalability issues.
He cautioned, however, that the full deployment of these security developments is still a few years away.
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Buterin presents a 2030 roadmap to guarantee total security
In a January 3 article on X, Buterin said that Ethereum’s integration of zero-knowledge virtual machines had changed the network’s capabilities.
He added that this change is due to the coupling of ZK-EVMs with the PeerDAS data distribution method.
“These are not minor improvements; they make Ethereum a fundamentally new and more powerful type of decentralized network,” he said.
He claimed that this combination solves the “blockchain trilemma” – the historical technical difficulty of simultaneously achieving decentralization, security and high bandwidth.
Buterin likened the improved architecture to a “BitTorrent with consensus,” contrasting it with the Bitcoin model, which prioritizes decentralization but struggles with data throughput.
With the new upgrades, he noted, Ethereum can now handle data loads comparable to massive file sharing networks while maintaining the security of a decentralized ledger.
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“The trilemma has been solved – not on paper, but with code running live, half of which (data availability sampling) is on the mainnet today, and the other half (ZK-EVM) is production quality in terms of performance today – security is what remains,” he argued.
However, the roadmap for implementing this vision extends over a long period of time.
Although Buterin said the technology has achieved “production-grade performance,” he acknowledged that significant work remains to ensure the system is secure.
According to its timeline, ZK-EVMs will only become the primary method of block validation between 2027 and 2030. These systems will enable faster and cheaper transaction verification without exposing the underlying data.
In the meantime, the network plans to implement gradual upgrades.
This year, Buterin expects the gas limit to increase. Developing new protocols would do this by separating transaction proposers from block builders and increasing the amount of work each block can handle.
In the longer term, Buterin defined a goal of “distributed block construction.” It is a system in which no single entity constructs a complete set of transactions.
He said distributing this authority reduced the risk of centralized censorship and ensured that transactions were processed more uniformly across regions.
“The long-term ideal of the Holy Grail is to arrive at a future in which the entire bloc is never constituted in one place. This will not be necessary for a long time, but in my opinion it is worth striving for so that we at least have the capacity to do so,” Buterin wrote.
This technical turning point comes as Ethereum continues to face fierce competition from faster, lower-cost blockchains, forcing developers to accelerate the deployment of these next-generation scaling solutions.
