A few years ago, the easiest way to explain Bitcoin to beginners was to keep it simple, slow, and robust.
10 minute blocks. limited space. Everyone checks everything. No one gets special treatment.
Its design is distinctive. That’s what makes Bitcoin feel like bedrock.
That’s why every bull market repeats the same argument. Block space is tight, fees are rising, users are complaining, and builders are promising solutions that exist somewhere above the base layer.
This week, Vitalik Buterin made a completely different claim about the future of Ethereum that lands directly in Bitcoin territory.
In a post to X, he said: claimed The blockchain “trilemma” is solved by combining PeerDAS on mainnet with zkEVM, which reaches “alpha” performance, and security work continues.
He charted a path from 2026 to 2030 in which proofs increasingly replace reruns as the block validation method for Ethereum.
He also pointed to the third pillar. That means over time, more decentralized block construction becomes possible, making it harder for smaller clubs of builders to include transactions.
If you live primarily in Bitcoinland, you’ll want to shrug. Ethereum always has a roadmap, there are always new acronyms, and Bitcoin will continue to play its role.
This is worth a closer look. This isn’t so much a new upgrade as it is a transition of what a “decentralized network” can do with code that is already shipped, at least in theory.
part of today’s reality
Ethereum’s Fusaka upgrade went live for certain mainnet slots on December 3, 2025. The Ethereum Foundation publishes precise slot timings, and its highlight feature was PeerDAS.
PeerDAS is one of those ideas that sounds abstract until you boil it down to one question.
When a rollup posts data to Ethereum, how does it ensure that the data is actually available on the network without every node having to download every byte?
PeerDAS answers with sampling.
Nodes subscribe to small slices of BLOB data. Because the random parts are checked thoroughly, the network can guarantee a high degree of confidence that everything is present.
The calculations behind it use erasure coding, so if enough of the complete set exists, the missing parts can be reconstructed.
In layman’s terms, Ethereum is trying to increase throughput while preventing “regular node” workloads from exploding.
According to Ethereum.org’s own description, the default node listens on 8 out of 128 subnets, and the BLOB is expanded for sampling, so it receives about one-eighth of the original BLOB data under PeerDAS.
This is important because bandwidth is one of the silent obstacles to decentralization.
As the cost of maintaining synchronization increases, home operators quit. The network appears decentralized while acting like a small number of specialized operators.
Fusaka also introduced something that seems small but can become huge over time: a fork with only BLOB parameters.
These are pre-programmed mini-upgrades that adjust blob targets and maximums without the full drama of a traditional hard fork.
The idea is to allow Ethereum to incrementally increase the capacity of blobs as the network proves it can handle it.
The Ethereum Foundation has published a schedule for BPO1 to increase the blob target and maximum to 10 and 15 on December 9, 2025. BPO2 is scheduled to increase its targets and maximums again to 14 and 21 on January 7, 2026.
Coin Metrics positioned this as the beginning of Ethereum treating blob throughput like a dial that can be turned.
The report also notes that blobs were performing close to the previous 6 blob goal and that blob pricing was often stuck at 1-way (a polite way of saying the market was barely charging for the resource).
This “barely charging” issue is why another EIP keeps appearing in the background.
Set a floor price so that the base price of the blob is not close to zero compared to the cost of execution.
If you are a Bitcoiner, this should already be familiar to you.
Bitcoin block space is rare and therefore expensive, and scarcity is important. Ethereum is looking to expand blob space for rollups without making it a free lunch that invites spam and centralizes verification.
zkEVM part: fast enough now, safe enough later
PeerDAS is live today. The zkEVM argument is about what happens next.
In December, the Ethereum Foundation published its second “L1 zkEVM Shipping” update. This update is upfront about changing priorities. Speed is no longer the primary issue. Is it provably safe?
The Foundation has developed milestones through 2026. This includes a goal of 100 bits of provable security by the end of May 2026 and 128 bits of provable security by the end of 2026, along with limits on proof size.
This is why Bitcoin is important.
The story of Bitcoin base layer security is easy enough to explain over the dinner table. Miners hash it, nodes verify it, invalid blocks are rejected, and the network continues.
The Ethereum story is trending towards a world where the network can accept much more activity, as validators verify concise proofs rather than reproducing every step of the execution themselves.
It’s a different kind of trust. It’s still decentralized in the sense that anyone can verify it, but it’s more focused on cryptography, implementation correctness, and the economics of who creates the proof.
It also comes with a timeline.
Vitalik’s post paints a picture of 2026 as the year when other upgrades will significantly increase gas limits and provide the first real chance to run zkEVM nodes.
He frames 2027-2030 as the time when zkEVM validation becomes the primary path for block validation.
Why should you care about Bitcoin, even if nothing changes in it?
Bitcoin doesn’t need to “win” throughput. You need to continue to earn trust.
For a long time, Bitcoin’s strongest competitive advantage, in addition to its decentralization, has been its base layer, which is easy to understand, conservative, and extremely difficult to change.
Ethereum’s strength is its flexibility and willingness to extend through new primitives and rely on rollups for most user activities.
Those roads are now colliding.
If Ethereum can scale data availability while keeping node requirements limited, and promote proof-based verification without violating trust assumptions, the market could gain a second trusted “payment style” network.
It allows you to handle high-bandwidth activity without appearing like a licensed data center.
It affects Bitcoin in three ways.
First, there is a narrative premium over block space.
Bitcoin fees go up when demand spikes. That’s normal and a market signal.
By expanding blob capacity and smoothing the fee market, Ethereum seeks to make the rollup fee experience more similar to the Internet: stable, cheap, and boring.
Even if Ethereum is successful, Bitcoin block space will remain at a premium. However, the use cases that require premium payments are likely to be narrowed down to high-value transfers, long-term storage movements, and payments for tiered systems.
Second, there’s the fight over all the other distributed rails.
Many of the “real world” pitches of cryptocurrencies, tokenized dollars, on-chain equities, and supply chain payments, live or die by cost and throughput.
Base’s scaling evaluation report says that during frequent capacity increases, median fees have fallen from about $0.30 to a fraction of a cent. We also show Ethereum’s data availability roadmap, which includes PeerDAS and further BLOB growth as the next thing we unlock.
Once this type of user experience exists at scale, capital and construction companies will follow suit. Bitcoin’s role becomes more explicitly monetary and less versatile.
Some Bitcoiners would call this a victory. Some may see Ethereum absorbing the parts of cryptocurrencies that attract mainstream users.
Third, the new centralization battleground that Bitcoin already understands.
Bitcoin risks center on regulations surrounding mining pools, ASIC supply chains, administrators and large-scale intermediaries.
Ethereum’s next risks center around the prover market and block construction, something Vitalik acknowledged while talking about mechanisms such as decentralized block construction and inclusion lists.
In Ethereum’s roadmap, the tools you’ll see here include proposer-constructor separation, inclusion lists to force fork selection, and block-level access lists. The goal is to avoid handing control over to a small number of professional actors.
Bitcoiners have seen this movie.
Scaling often moves power from one place to another. The most difficult thing is to keep the system neutral when tools become expensive.
What will happen in the next four years?
No one can declare victory for cryptocurrencies without a few “if” statements, and Ethereum’s own sources make it clear that zkEVM security remains a major undertaking.
So the honest way to cover this is to use scenarios. The impact on Bitcoin will vary depending on which path unfolds.
Scenario 1: Slow and deliberate, fewer surprises. PeerDAS continues to expand blob capacity through scheduled parameter forks. zkEVM security milestones take time, and evidence-based verification will remain optional longer than enthusiasts would like.
In this world, Ethereum improves the rollup fee experience. The market gradually treats ETH as the most scalable “trusted and neutral” payment network other than Bitcoin.
Bitcoin remains the most conservative monetary base. Competitive tensions remain ideological and investor-driven.
Scenario 2: Demand drives the roadmap forward. The rollup quickly absorbs the blob’s capacity, and the utilization remains high after each BPO step, and Ethereum continues to turn the dial upwards.
In this world, the “cheap crypto UX” narrative is unified around the Ethereum rollup stack. Bitcoin becomes even more obvious as a payment and savings layer.
The market is beginning to question whether Bitcoin’s L2 ecosystem can provide a similar experience while preserving Bitcoin’s social and technological conservatism.
Scenario 3: The zk proof works and the argument changes. Ethereum has achieved its security goals, proof verification has become the default for validators, and higher gas limits are now achievable without increasing hardware requirements for everyone.
In this world, Ethereum’s claims to “high bandwidth decentralization” are becoming difficult to dismiss. Bitcoin’s differentiation relies heavily on its simplicity, immutability, and monetary policy.
The investor conversation will shift to two base layers with different philosophies, rather than a number of alternative chains competing for speed with one base layer.
What users actually feel
Most users don’t wake up excited about sampling data availability.
They wake up frustrated that moving costs too much, swaps fail, and meme coin mints are eating their paychecks in fees.
Bitcoin users know this pain, too, especially when the pool gets crowded and fees are higher than for regular users.
Ethereum’s promise here is a future where the base layer remains decentralized enough for regular validators, while the user experience rolls up with costs like app fees rather than payment fees.
Even if that happens, Bitcoin will not disappear. Clarify Bitcoin.
When you want to leave the casino, you can rely on Bitcoin.
Ethereum will be a network that attempts to expand casinos without collapsing into a single operator.
The risk is that Ethereum’s path will require more moving parts, more cryptography, more sophisticated markets for building and proving blocks, and more opportunities for concentration to sneak in through the backdoor.
Vitalik said so, emphasizing that building decentralized blocks is an unfinished business.
Bitcoin risks are different. Even as demand increases, supply remains slow, scarce, and expensive.
The industry continues to try to restructure the world with layers above it.
conclusion
Vitalik’s sentence “The trilemma has been solved” became a headline. It’s essentially a roadmap, with real code already deployed on the data side and a strong security push on the proof side.
Bitcoin should be careful because if Ethereum can scale without pricing regular validators, it will weaken the strongest argument for Bitcoin as the only trusted and neutral base layer for cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin should also remain calm. Bitcoin’s value proposition is not throughput.
This is a base layer of restraint, predictability, and readability under stress.
The more Ethereum evolves towards a high-bandwidth payment structure, the more Bitcoin’s role as a conservative monetary anchor seems intentional rather than outdated.
That’s the competition cryptocurrencies need. The two networks will push different definitions of trust, forcing the rest of the market to stop confusing speed with decentralization.