Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the network has effectively “solved” the blockchain trilemma of decentralization, consensus, and high bandwidth, claiming that the missing elements are either present on mainnet or within reach as the Zero Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (ZK-EVM) moves toward production use.
In a Jan. 3 post to
“These are not small improvements; they are transforming Ethereum into a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of decentralized network,” Buterin wrote. “To see why, let’s take a look at the two major types of p2p networks to date.”
Buterin drew a contrast between early peer-to-peer systems, which could scale throughput but lacked consensus on shared state, and blockchain, which achieved robust consensus but paid the price with limited bandwidth. He cited BitTorrent as a model for decentralized decentralization without consensus, and “Bitcoin as a model for decentralization and consensus that keeps bandwidth low because the work is not ‘distributed’ in the sense of being split, but is replicated.”
Ethereum solves the blockchain trilemma
The argument, Buterin said, is that Ethereum is moving into the third category. “Currently, Ethereum with PeerDAS (2025) and ZK-EVM (we expect part of the network to use Ethereum in 2026) gives us decentralization, consensus, and high bandwidth,” he said. “The trilemma was solved not on paper, but by code actually running. Half of it (data availability sampling) is now on mainnet, and the performance of the other half (ZK-EVM) is production quality today. What remains is safety.”
Buterin framed this as the culmination of a multi-year roadmap, rather than a sudden breakthrough. He described this as a “10-year journey” and noted that the ZK-EVM effort began around 2020, going back to early data availability sampling studies. The crux of his argument is that data availability sampling changes what decentralized networks can securely publish publicly and verify at scale, while ZK-EVM changes how nodes verify execution, and as the technology matures, verification will move toward proof-based verification.
Looking ahead, Buterin laid out a rough timeline of how he expects the vision to play out over the next four years. In 2026, it expects “significant increases in ZKEVM-independent gas limits” related to BAL and ePBS, in addition to this, it said, the first opportunity to run ZK-EVM nodes.
From 2026 to 2028, he expects to see a series of changes, resetting gas prices, adjusting the state structure, moving execution payloads to blobs, and other steps aimed at making higher gas limits safe. From 2027 to 2030, he predicts that ZK-EVM will become “the primary method of validating blocks on the network” and “gas limits will be raised even more significantly.”
He also flagged what he calls the “third piece” of the puzzle: building distributed blocks. He wrote that the long-term goal is a world in which “complete blocks are never made up of a single location,” but stressed that this “won’t be necessary for a long time.” The near-term focus is on distributing “meaningful authority in block construction” through mechanisms within the protocol (suggesting the expansion of FOCIL as the primary trading channel) or systems outside the protocol, such as a decentralized builder marketplace.
For Buterin, decentralizing block construction is not just an engineering priority, but also a matter of risk and fairness. He argued that it would create a “better environment for geographic equity” while reducing the potential for “centralized interference with the inclusion of real-time transactions.”
At the time of writing, ETH was trading at $3,164.
Featured image from YouTube, chart from TradingView.com
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