Ethereum has solved the blockchain trilemma, according to Vitalik Buterin. He cites two advancements—zero-knowledge virtual machines and the Fusaka upgrade, which introduced peer data availability sampling—and says the benefits will take years to materialize. Buterin described Ethereum as becoming a fundamentally new decentralised network, arguing that the trilemma has been solved not on paper but with live running code.
Fusaka’s introduction of PeerDAS allows individual nodes to store a fraction of blob data without compromising their ability to verify the entirety of that data. It increased Ethereum’s blob capacity eightfold, with higher capacities coming in gradually through a series of smaller upgrades. Buterin has argued that PeerDAS could eventually make transactions cheaper on Ethereum itself, noting that blobs are largely for Layer 2s today and that, in the long term, there is a goal to dump L1 data into blobs as well.
Zero-knowledge virtual machines provide a more efficient mechanism for verifying proposed blocks. Currently, each validator must re-execute every proposed transaction to confirm validity, but zero-knowledge technology allows a single participant to generate a proof that the entire batch is correct. This dramatically lowers validators’ computational demands, enabling more transactions or greater complexity without excluding smaller participants who cannot afford top‑of‑the‑line hardware. Upgrades such as block-level access lists and enshrined proposer‑builder separation will make it easier to operate nodes running zero-knowledge virtual machines, with the aim that by 2030 this could become the primary way to validate blocks on Ethereum.
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