Vitalik Buterin Says ZK-EVMs and PeerDAS Put Ethereum on Path to Breaking the Blockchain Trilemma

• Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said that getting zkEVM and PeerDAS on mainnet will help to achieve scalability, security, and decentralization, all at once.
• zkEVMs have reached production-grade efficiency, cutting proof times from minutes to seconds and reducing costs by 45x.

Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain network, made a major announcement in overcoming blockchain’s long-standing scalability trilemma. Buterin said that the blockchain mainnet has successfully deployed zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines (zkEVMs) along with the PeerDAS technology. He added that the integration is an outcome of nearly a decade of research and development. Back in 2015, Ethereum started working on scalability with its first data availability sampling work. Five years later in 2020, the early development of zkEVM technology began. These developments work together to improve scalability and efficiency without losing out on decentralization and security. In his post on the X platform on Jan. 4, Buterin showed how the Ethereum protocol addresses the trilemma of decentralization, consensus, and high bandwidth, all at the same time. He wrote:

“These are not minor improvements; they are shifting Ethereum into being a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of decentralized network”.

Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin Talks About Architectural Updates Vitalik Buterin has also noted that the major architectural upgrades for the Ethereum blockchain address long-standing trade-offs that have blocked the earlier peer-to-peer systems. Buterin noted that early networks such as BitTorrent achieved high bandwidth and decentralization; however, they lacked in consensus mechanism. On the other hand, the Bitcoin blockchain gave priority to decentralization and consensus while compromising on throughput. According to him, Ethereum’s updated design breaks this pattern. It distributes computational workloads across nodes while preserving full cryptographic verification of state transitions. Buterin also stated that the zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines (zkEVMs) have now reached production-grade performance. Moreover, proving times have dropped from 16 minutes to about 16 seconds. At the same time, the costs have also dropped by 45x. As a result, around 99% of Ethereum blocks can now be proven in under 10 seconds on target hardware. In parallel, PeerDAS technology allows nodes to confirm data availability by sampling small portions of block data instead of downloading entire blocks. This method significantly increases throughput without undermining decentralization, said Buterin. Recently, the Ethereum co-founder also noted that Ethereum Foundation has solved its P2P networking weakness, as reported by CNF. The Ethereum Foundation has also outlined a security-first roadmap to accompany these upgrades. Under the plan, development teams are required to reach 128-bit provable security by the end of 2026, with interim targets of 100-bit security by May 2026. Rollout Time for zkEVM Moves to 2030 Vitalik Buterin has also shared a multi-year rollout plan spanning roughly four years. The roadmap begins in 2026 with significant gas-limit increases that do not depend on zkEVM. This phase will also introduce the first opportunities for operators to run zkEVM nodes. From 2026 through 2028, developers will roll out gas repricing measures, changes to state structure, and the migration of execution payloads into data blobs. These upgrades will support higher throughput in a controlled and secure manner. Looking further ahead, Buterin said that between 2027 and 2030, zkEVM-based validation will become the dominant method for block verification.