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Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co-founder, says recent protocol upgrades have effectively addressed the decades-old blockchain trilemma by combining innovations now operating on Ethereum’s mainnet. He framed the convergence of PeerDAS and ZK-EVMs as a defining moment for the network. PeerDAS, short for Peer-to-Peer Data Availability Sampling, was introduced with the Fusaka upgrade late last year and is designed to reduce the burden on validators by sampling small subsets of data rather than requiring full downloads. ZK-EVMs have reached production-quality performance, with safety work continuing before broader deployment, according to Buterin.

Together, these technologies aim to boost throughput while preserving decentralization and security — a balance that long eluded blockchains. Buterin describes this pairing as signaling a shift from incremental improvements to a structurally different decentralized system capable of higher bandwidth for consensus. He notes that separating data availability, execution logic and validation enables addressing the trilemma concurrently. PeerDAS works by allowing nodes to verify that transaction data exists without downloading the entire dataset, using erasure coding to reconstruct missing pieces.

This approach significantly lowers computational and storage requirements on validators and is expected to support higher transaction bandwidth. A multi-year roadmap outlines further scaling milestones, including gas limit increases independent of ZK-EVMs in 2026 and initial opportunities for validators to run ZK-EVM nodes. From 2026 through 2028, upgrades will focus on gas repricing and state changes, including moving execution payloads into data blobs to enable safer higher throughput.

From 2027 onward, ZK-EVMs are expected to play an increasing role in block validation, with potential further major gas increases through 2030. Long-term ambitions include distributed block building to minimize central points of transaction inclusion and promote geographic fairness, though he said such features will take time to mature.