Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the network has finally overcome the fundamental blockchain trilemma thanks to the combination of zero-knowledge Ethereum virtual machines and PeerDAS technology now running on the mainnet.
This advancement marks the culmination of a decade-long technical journey that began with Buterin’s first data availability sampling engagement in 2015 and the start of ZKEVM development around 2020.
“These are not minor improvements; they make Ethereum a fundamentally new and more powerful type of decentralized networkButerin wrote in an article on X, describing how the protocol now simultaneously offers decentralization, consensus and high bandwidth, a feat previously thought impossible.
Buterin explained that early peer-to-peer networks faced severe limitations, with BitTorrent offering massive bandwidth and decentralization but no consensus mechanism.
At the same time, Bitcoin Decentralization and consensus were achieved at the cost of extremely low throughput due to replicated rather than distributed work.
Ethereum’s new architecture breaks this pattern by distributing computational work across nodes while maintaining cryptographic verification of all state transitions.
ZKEVMs have achieved production-grade performance, with proof times dropping from 16 minutes to 16 seconds and costs reduced by 45x, with 99% of Ethereum blocks now able to be proven in less than 10 seconds on target hardware.
Meanwhile, PeerDAS allows nodes to check data availability by sampling small portions rather than downloading entire blocks, thereby significantly increasing throughput without sacrificing decentralization.
The Ethereum Foundation has established a security-focused roadmap requiring teams to achieve provable 128-bit security by the end of 2026, with intermediate steps to 100-bit security by May 2026 and mandatory integration with the soundcalc security estimation tool by February.
“If an attacker can falsify a proof, he can falsify everything: create tokens from scratch, rewrite a state, steal funds,“, the foundation warned in December, emphasizing that performance gains cannot compromise cryptographic integrity.
George Kadianakis of the foundation’s cryptography team stressed the importance of securing architectures before they become moving targets.
“Once the teams have achieved these goals and the zkVM architectures have stabilized, the formal verification work we have invested in can reach its full potential,” he wrote, noting that recent advances in compact polynomial engagement schemes like WHIR and techniques like JaggedPCS now make it possible to achieve ambitious security goals.
