Vitalik Buterin presents a revolutionary scaling path for Ethereum through innovative technologies

Co-founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin made a key statement that the network is entering a critical development period when two major technological solutions are transitioning from research to practical implementation. This event could potentially redefine the capabilities of blockchain as a whole, enabling decentralization, consensus, and high throughput simultaneously.

Solving the Blockchain Trilemma: Vitalik Buterin’s Vision

Vitalik Buterin emphasized that the main problem with blockchains lies in the classic trade-off: a system can be decentralized and have reliable consensus, but its performance remains limited. He provided a clear comparison using examples from internet history.

BitTorrent demonstrates how decentralized systems can transfer massive amounts of data, but they do not require consensus among participants. Bitcoin, on the other hand, provides a high level of decentralization and consensus but remains a system with low throughput — each node must independently verify all work instead of distributing this load across the network.

The next stage of Ethereum, according to Vitalik, involves achieving all three parameters simultaneously: decentralization, consensus, and scalability through distributed verification work.

PeerDAS in Action: The First Step Toward Scaling

The first component of the strategy is already functioning in the mainnet. PeerDAS (distributed data availability sampling) allows nodes to verify data availability without downloading the full dataset. This is a prototype of Data Availability Sampling technology, which has become key to scaling Ethereum through sharding.

The mechanism works as follows: light clients can verify the completeness of shard data publication by analyzing only small random samples. This approach significantly enhances system scalability while maintaining decentralization and security.

zkEVM: From Theory to Production Code

The second important component, zkEVM (Zero-Knowledge Virtual Machine for Ethereum), has reached production-level performance, as noted by Vitalik Buterin. Remaining work focuses on ensuring full security and proof resilience at scale.

Buterin described this as a practical transition from theory to “working real-time code.” He estimates that zkEVM nodes could start appearing in limited form as early as 2026, which would be a significant breakthrough for the ecosystem.

Distributed Block Construction: Long-Term Goal

A more ambitious long-term goal is the implementation of distributed block construction, where no single party assembles the full block in one place. Such architecture significantly reduces censorship risks and increases the network’s geographical fairness by distributing power among participants.

The overall Ethereum roadmap trend is toward gradually distributing verification load across the network, moving away from the requirement of full data replication on each node.

Market Context and Outlook

As of (January 2026), Ethereum is trading at around $3.02K with a daily increase of 1.39%, and a daily trading volume of $700.82M. The market capitalization is $364.27B. In comparison, Bitcoin is at $90.16K (+0.62% in 24 hours) with a capitalization of $1.801 trillion.

The technological breakthroughs described by Vitalik could potentially significantly impact Ethereum’s usage and value, especially if scaling solutions resolve historical throughput issues.