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Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said on Monday that new technology rolling out on the network is pushing Ethereum into a new phase that he believes can finally overcome its long running trade off between decentralization, security and capacity, adding that Ethereum has effectively “solved the trilemma”.
ZK EVMs and PeerDAS at the Core of the Upgrade
Buterin said in a post on X that progress on “zero knowledge Ethereum virtual machines”, known as ZK EVMs, together with a data system called PeerDAS, is turning Ethereum into what he described as a fundamentally more powerful decentralized network. He framed the shift as the result of a ten-year research effort that is only now showing up in live code and a real roadmap for the rest of the decade.
Buterin said that one part of the upgrade, PeerDAS, is already live on mainnet, allowing nodes to verify that block data exists with probabilistic checks instead of each one downloading the full data.
The other part, ZK EVMs, allows lightweight verification of complex execution through cryptographic proofs and is already fast enough on external networks, but is not yet used to validate blocks on Ethereum itself, as more work is needed on safety before it can become the main way the chain is verified.
From BitTorrent and Bitcoin to a New Network Model
In his post, Buterin compared Ethereum’s direction with earlier peer to peer networks. He cited BitTorrent as an example of a system with very high total bandwidth and strong decentralization but no global consensus, and Bitcoin as a later network that introduced consensus but kept throughput low because every node replicates the same data instead of splitting up the work, adding that Ethereum with PeerDAS and ZK EVMs aims to keep decentralization and consensus while raising bandwidth by changing how data is stored, sampled and verified rather than copied in full by every participant.
Roadmap Points to Higher Gas Limits and ZK Based Validation
Buterin outlined a path in which gas limits could rise from 2026 onward, Ethereum’s state structure would be adjusted to make higher limits safe, and ZK EVMs would gradually become the primary tool for checking blocks between 2027 and 2030.
Buterin Outlines Vision of Widely Distributed Block Building
Buterin also set out a third part of his long term vision, which is to spread block-building across more participants so that no single operator or small group has excessive control over which transactions are included in the chain.
In an ideal future, he said, a full block would never exist in one place at all, but would instead be assembled in a more diffuse way across the network, even if that is not needed in the near term.
Before that, Buterin wants real decision-making power in block construction pushed out to the edges of the system, either through new transaction channels inside the protocol or through more widely spread builder marketplaces, to lower the risk of censorship and improve geographic fairness in which transactions get included.
The Trilemma vs The New Ethereum Stack
The blockchain scalability trilemma is the idea that a chain cannot fully maximize decentralization, security and scalability at the same time and usually has to sacrifice at least one of them. Bitcoin and early Ethereum leaned toward decentralization and security, but at the cost of limited throughput, according to Buterin, who first popularized the concept in 2015.
The new tools Buterin highlights aim to fix that trade off rather than accept it. A zero knowledge Ethereum virtual machine, or ZK EVM, is an Ethereum compatible environment that runs smart contracts and then produces a compact cryptographic proof that the execution followed the rules, meaning nodes only need to verify the proof on Ethereum instead of replaying every transaction, which can sharply cut the cost of checking blocks while keeping the same security model.
PeerDAS addresses the data bottleneck by letting nodes sample small pieces of coded block data instead of downloading it all, so the network can support much larger data volumes without making validation a task only heavy hardware can handle.
Taken together, these approaches can get Ethereum much closer to solving the trilemma, pairing high throughput with broad participation and strong security. However, academic work still treats the trilemma as a real structural limit, and ZK-based systems introduce new trade offs such as prover complexity and fresh assumptions about honest behavior.
If the rollout works as designed, users can expect cheaper transactions, more room for rollups and a network that remains widely verifiable from consumer-grade machines rather than shifting toward a small club of industrial validators.
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