Vitalik Buterin claims that live ZK-EVMs and data availability sampling have effectively solved the blockchain trilemma, with security now the final frontier.
Published January 5, 2026 at 7:07 am EST.
Co-founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin claimed that the blockchain trilemma – balancing decentralization, security and scalability – was solved with the live implementation of ZK-EVM and PeerDAS.
“The trilemma has been solved – not on paper, but with code running live, half of which (data availability sampling) is *on mainnet today*, and the other half (ZK-EVM) is *production quality over performance today* – security is what remains”, said Buterin in an article on X.
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PeerDAS, introduced to the Ethereum mainnet with the recent Fusaka upgrade, allows validators to sample data availability randomly instead of downloading full blocks, mimicking the efficiency of BitTorrent with consensus.
ZK-EVMs enable rapid verification of transactions without revealing the underlying data, thereby achieving production-grade performance. Buterin expects that by 2030, further increases in gas limits will allow ZK-EVMs to become the primary means of validating blocks on the network.
