Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the network has effectively “solved” the blockchain trilemma: decentralization, consensus and high bandwidth, arguing that the missing ingredients are now present on the mainnet or within reach as zero-knowledge Ethereum virtual machines (ZK-EVM) scale toward production use.
In a January 3 article on
“These are not minor improvements; they make Ethereum a fundamentally new and more powerful type of decentralized network,” Buterin wrote. “To understand why, let’s look at the two main types of p2p networks so far.”
Buterin drew a contrast between early peer-to-peer systems that could increase throughput but lacked agreement on shared state, and blockchains that achieved strong consensus but paid for it with limited bandwidth. He highlighted BitTorrent as a decentralized distribution model without consensus, and Bitcoin as a decentralization and consensus model that keeps bandwidth low because “it’s not ‘distributed’ in the sense that work is divided, it’s replicated.”
Ethereum will solve the blockchain trilemma
According to Buterin, Ethereum falls into a third category. “Now Ethereum with PeerDAS (2025) and ZK-EVM (expect small parts of the network to use it in 2026) we get: decentralized, consensus and high bandwidth,” he said. “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 in terms of performance today – security is what’s left.”
Buterin presented this as the culmination of a multi-year roadmap rather than a sudden breakthrough. He described it as a “10-year journey,” recalling early research on data availability sampling and noting that ZK-EVM efforts began around 2020. The arc of his argument is that data availability sampling changes what a decentralized network can securely publish and verify at scale, while ZK-EVMs change how nodes can validate execution, shifting validation toward evidence-based verification at scale. as technology evolves.
Looking ahead, Buterin laid out a rough timeline of how he expects his vision to unfold over the next four years. In 2026, he expects “significant increases in non-ZKEVM-dependent gas limits” related to BALs and ePBS, alongside what he described as the first opportunities to run a ZK-EVM node.
From 2026 to 2028, it plans a sequence of changes, gas repricing, state structure adjustments, moving execution payloads to blobs, and other measures aimed at securing higher gas limits. Between 2027 and 2030, he expects “further significant increases in gas limits,” with ZK-EVMs becoming “the primary means of validating blocks on the network.”
He also pointed out what he calls a “third piece” of the puzzle: distributed block building. The long-term goal, he wrote, is a world in which “the entire bloc will never be constituted in one place,” although he stressed that this “will not be necessary for a long time.” The shorter-term goal is to distribute “significant authority in block construction,” either through in-protocol mechanisms – it initiated the expansion of FOCIL as a primary transaction channel – or through off-protocol systems such as distributed construction markets.
For Buterin, the distribution of block construction is not just a technical preference but a matter of risk and fairness: he argued that it would reduce the risk 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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