Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says Ethereum has reached a huge milestone that many people once believed was impossible. According to him, Ethereum has now solved the famous blockchain trilemma — the challenge of achieving decentralization, security (consensus), and high performance all at the same time.
Vitalik explained that this breakthrough comes from two major technologies now running on the network:
PeerDAS, which is already live on Ethereum’s mainnet, and ZK-EVMs, which have finally reached production-level performance.
For years, blockchains had to compromise. They could be fast but not decentralized, or decentralized but slow. Vitalik says that trade-off is no longer necessary.
“These are not small upgrades,” he wrote on X. “They turn Ethereum into a completely new and much more powerful kind of decentralized network.”
What Changed?
PeerDAS removes Ethereum’s long-standing bandwidth limits, allowing the network to handle much more data without sacrificing decentralization. At the same time, ZK-EVMs — which use zero-knowledge proofs to verify transactions — are now fast and reliable enough for real-world use.
Vitalik expects the first ZK-EVM nodes to appear in 2026, with wider adoption over the following years. Between 2027 and 2030, ZK-EVMs are expected to become the main way Ethereum validates blocks.
Why This Matters
Vitalik compared Ethereum’s progress to earlier internet technologies. BitTorrent had huge bandwidth and was very decentralized, but it had no consensus system. Bitcoin introduced strong consensus and decentralization, but stayed slow by design.
Now, according to Vitalik, Ethereum has all three:
- Decentralization
- Consensus
- High bandwidth
And not just in theory — but with live code running on the network today.
What Comes Next
In 2026, Ethereum will raise gas limits even further and introduce new systems like Bandwidth Allocation Limits and upgraded proposer-builder separation. Over the next few years, Ethereum will also reorganize how data and execution work to safely support higher capacity.
Looking further ahead, Vitalik described a long-term vision called distributed block building, where no single place ever constructs a full block. This would reduce centralization risks and improve fairness across regions.
Wrapping up, Vitalik reminded the community of Ethereum’s core mission:
to build a global “world computer” that acts as the backbone of a more open and free internet.
In short, Ethereum isn’t just getting faster — it’s entering a new phase of what decentralized networks can actually do.
