Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the network has finally cracked the fundamental blockchain trilemma through the combination of Ethereum’s knowledge-free virtual machines and the PeerDAS technology now running on the mainnet.
The discovery marks the culmination of a decade-long technical journey that began with Buterin’s first data availability sampling commitment in 2015 and early development of ZKEVM around 2020.
“These are not minor improvements; they transform Ethereum into a fundamentally new and more powerful type of decentralized network,” Buterin wrote in a post on X, describing how the protocol now offers decentralization, consensus, and high bandwidth simultaneously, a feat previously thought impossible.
Buterin explained that early peer-to-peer networks faced serious limitations, with BitTorrent offering massive bandwidth and decentralization but without a consensus mechanism.
At the same time, Bitcoin achieved decentralization and consensus at the cost of extremely low throughput due to replicated rather than distributed work.
Ethereum’s new architecture breaks this pattern by dividing the computational work between nodes while maintaining cryptographic verification of all state transitions.
ZKEVMs have achieved production-quality performance, with test times dropping from 16 minutes to 16 seconds and costs dropping by a factor of 45, with 99% of Ethereum blocks now provable in less than 10 seconds on target hardware.
Meanwhile, PeerDAS allows nodes to check data availability by sampling small portions rather than downloading entire blocks, dramatically expanding throughput without sacrificing decentralization.
The Ethereum Foundation has established a security roadmap that requires teams to achieve demonstrable 128-bit security by the end of 2026, with milestones to 100-bit security by May 2026 and mandatory integration with the security estimator soundcalc by February.
“If an attacker can fake a proof, they can fake anything: mint tokens from nothing, rewrite state, steal funds,” the foundation warned in December, stressing that performance gains cannot compromise cryptographic integrity.
George Kadianakis of the foundation’s cryptography team emphasized the importance of securing architectures before they become mobile targets.
“Once the teams have reached these targets and the zkVM architectures stabilize, the formal verification work we have invested in can reach its full potential,” he wrote, noting that recent advances in compact polynomial commitment schemes like WHIR and techniques like JaggedPCS now make ambitious security goals achievable.