Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has announced that the Ethereum network has achieved a breakthrough by solving blockchain's long-standing trilemma—the challenge of simultaneously achieving decentralization, consensus, and high bandwidth. This milestone is attributed to the combination of zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines (ZK-EVMs) reaching production-quality performance and PeerDAS (Peer-to-Peer Data Availability Sampling) technology now running live on the Ethereum mainnet.
Buterin emphasized the significance of this development in a post on X, stating, "These are not minor improvements; they are shifting Ethereum into being a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of decentralized network." He explained that early peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent offered high bandwidth and decentralization but lacked a consensus mechanism, while Bitcoin achieved decentralization and consensus at the cost of extremely low throughput. Ethereum's new architecture breaks this pattern by distributing computational work across nodes while maintaining cryptographic verification of all state transitions.
The technical achievements are substantial. ZK-EVMs have seen proving times drop from 16 minutes to 16 seconds, with costs falling 45-fold. Currently, 99% of Ethereum blocks are provable in under 10 seconds on target hardware. Meanwhile, PeerDAS allows nodes to verify data availability by sampling small portions of blocks instead of downloading them entirely, dramatically expanding throughput without sacrificing decentralization.
The Ethereum Foundation has set a security-first roadmap, requiring teams to achieve 128-bit provable security by the end of 2026, with intermediate milestones at 100-bit security by May 2026. George Kadianakis from the foundation's cryptography team stressed the importance of securing architectures before they become moving targets, noting that recent advances in compact polynomial commitment schemes make these ambitious security targets achievable.
Buterin outlined a detailed four-year deployment schedule. In 2026, the network will see large gas limit increases not dependent on ZK-EVMs, alongside the first opportunities to run ZK-EVM nodes. Between 2026 and 2028, developers will implement gas repricing, state structure changes, and migrate execution payloads into blobs to safely support higher throughput. From 2027 through 2030, ZK-EVM validation is expected to become the primary method for block verification as gas limits increase substantially. Distributed block building is described as a "long-term ideal holy grail" to reduce centralization risks and improve geographic fairness.
While celebrating the technical progress, Buterin also issued a cautionary note, warning Ethereum to resist chasing "fleeting trends" like tokenized dollars or political memecoins. He called for applications that pass the "walkaway test," functioning even if original developers disappear and remaining stable despite external disruptions.
The breakthrough is already attracting institutional adoption. JPMorgan is launching a $100 million tokenized money-market fund on Ethereum, and Deutsche Bank is developing a Layer 2 using ZKsync technology. Ethereum's total value locked is projected to rise tenfold in 2026.
