Alex Chen investigates Vitalik Buterin’s bombshell claim that Ethereum has solved the “impossible” blockchain trilemma and whether the technology backing JPMorgan’s $100M tokenized fund will finally make decentralized systems competitive with centralized giants.
The Tweet That Changed Everything
It was January 3, 2026, when Vitalik Buterin posted a message that tech historians may someday mark as blockchain’s
“we landed on the moon” moment: “The trilemma has been solved not on paper, but with live running code”
For those who don’t speak crypto-engineer, the claim sounded like someone announcing a perpetual motion machine except this one actually works and is running on Ethereum’s mainnet today, even as Ethereum gas futures begin pricing the cost dynamics that were once thought impossible to escape.
The blockchain trilemma first articulated by Buterin himself years ago stated you could have any two of three critical properties, but never all three simultaneously:
decentralization (no central control), security (consensus that can’t be attacked), and scalability (high transaction throughput). Bitcoin chose decentralization and security, sacrificing speed. Visa and traditional databases chose speed and security, sacrificing decentralization. Every blockchain for 17 years has made this brutal trade-off.
The Breakthrough: Two Technologies, One Revolution
Ethereum’s solution combines two technologies that sound like science fiction acronyms but represent years of painstaking cryptographic engineering:
1. PeerDAS: The Bandwidth Liberator
PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling) went live on Ethereum mainnet in 2025 and is processing transactions right now. It removes the historical bandwidth bottleneck that forced every node to download and verify every piece of data.
Instead, nodes can sample tiny random pieces of data and use probability theory to guarantee with mathematical certainty that the full data exists. It’s like verifying a swimming pool is full of water by testing a few drops if the samples are random enough and cryptographically provable, you don’t need to drain the entire pool
The impact: Ethereum can now process massively more data while maintaining decentralization, because individual validators don’t need enterprise-grade hardware to participate.
2. ZK-EVMs: The Verification Revolution
Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines (ZK-EVMs) reached production-grade performance at the alpha stage meaning they’re fast enough, cheap enough, and reliable enough for real-world use. These systems allow one node to prove it correctly executed thousands of transactions without other nodes re-running all the computations.
Think of it this way: instead of 10,000 students each solving the same math problem to verify the answer, one student solves it and generates a cryptographic proof that’s instantly verifiable by everyone else. Proving times have dropped to seconds, and costs have been slashed 45x compared to earlier implementations.
The Engineer’s Relief
Dankrad Feist, a researcher on Ethereum‘s cryptography team who spent five years working on data availability sampling, posted simply:
“This felt impossible in 2019. Now it’s production code. That’s what a decade of not giving up looks like”.
The technical journey was brutal. Buterin made his initial commitment to data availability sampling in 2015. ZK-EVM development started around 2020. Between those dates countless failed prototypes, security audits revealing critical flaws, and competitors claiming Ethereum was obsolete.
“There were months where we thought this might be mathematically impossible,” one Ethereum Foundation researcher told me privately.
“Not ‘hard’ impossible. Like trying to build a room that’s bigger on the inside than the outside. Then someone would find a cryptographic trick that bought us another 10% efficiency, and we’d keep grinding.”
The Three-Way Balance: How It Actually Works
Here’s what Ethereum now achieves simultaneously:
| Property | How Ethereum Delivers It | Previous Trade-Off |
|---|---|---|
| Decentralization | PeerDAS allows low-spec nodes to participate via sampling instead of full replication | Required high bandwidth = only powerful nodes could run validators |
| Security (Consensus) | ZK-EVMs cryptographically prove correct execution; PeerDAS guarantees data availability | High security meant slow, replicated verification by all nodes |
| Scalability (High Bandwidth) | Distributed block building + data sampling = massive throughput without centralization | High throughput required centralized validators or weak security |
Buterin’s explanation was characteristically technical: “Bitcoin (2009) gave us consensus and decentralization but low bandwidth through replicated, not distributed, work. Now, Ethereum with PeerDAS (2025) and ZK-EVMs (expect small portions of the network using it in 2026), we get decentralized, consensus and high bandwidth. The trilemma has been solved”.
The Roadmap: From Prototype to Planetary Infrastructure
Buterin laid out a four-year deployment timeline that reads like a moonshot program:
2026: The Gas Limit Explosion
- Bandwidth Allocation Limits (BALs) and enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS) enable massive gas limit increases without depending on ZK-EVMs
- First ZK-EVM nodes go live on mainnet not theoretical, not testnet, but processing real transactions
- Target: Large portions of the network begin using ZK-EVM validation
2026-2028: Safe Scaling
- Repricing and state tweaks to ensure security isn’t compromised during scaling
- Gradual transition from traditional EVM execution to zero-knowledge proving as primary validation method
2027-2030: ZK Dominance
- ZK-EVMs become the primary block validation method across the network
- Huge throughput jumps as distributed block building removes bottlenecks
- Security milestone: Ethereum Foundation targeting 128-bit provable security by end-2026
The Validator’s Calculation
Maria Santos runs three Ethereum validators from her home in Portugal hardware worth about $15,000 that earns her roughly $2,800 monthly in staking rewards. She’s been watching the ZK-EVM developments closely.
“Right now, I need to keep upgrading my hardware every 18 months to handle increasing data loads,” she explained via video call. “If PeerDAS and ZK-EVMs work as advertised, I can keep validating from home for the next decade without becoming obsolete. That’s the difference between Ethereum staying decentralized or becoming another system only data centers can afford to run.”
For Ethereum’s 1 million+ validators globally, this isn’t abstract it’s whether their livelihoods and the network’s decentralization survive the next phase of scaling.
The Institutional Proof: Wall Street Votes With Capital
The timing of Buterin’s announcement isn’t coincidental. Major financial institutions are already building on Ethereum’s upgraded infrastructure:
JPMorgan’s $100M Bet
On December 16, 2025, JPMorgan Asset Management launched MONY (My OnChain Net Yield Fund) the bank’s first tokenized money market fund built on Ethereum. The fund runs on JPMorgan’s Kinexys Digital Assets platform and is open to qualified investors who can earn yield while holding tokens directly on the blockchain.
This follows the enactment of the Genius Act in July 2025, which established a new national regulatory framework for tokenized dollar stablecoins and digital assets. JPMorgan isn’t experimenting it’s operationalizing blockchain finance at institutional scale.
Deutsche Bank’s Layer 2 Infrastructure
Deutsche Bank is building on ZKsync a Layer 2 scaling solution that uses ZK-rollup technology, the same cryptographic approach underlying ZK-EVMs .The bank is leveraging zero-knowledge proofs for privacy-preserving, compliant cross-border settlements.
The Pattern: Tech First, Then Capital
“JPMorgan didn’t wake up one day and decide to tokenize $100 million on Ethereum for fun,” noted a tokenization analyst at a major consultancy. “They spent 18-24 months stress-testing the infrastructure, running pilots, getting legal sign-off. The fact that MONY launched in December 2025 right as PeerDAS went live and ZK-EVMs hit production grade isn’t coincidence. The tech finally met institutional requirements”.
The Developer Explosion: What This Enables
If the trilemma is truly solved, the design space for blockchain applications explodes:
- Real-time DeFi: Decentralized exchanges and lending protocols can finally compete with centralized platforms on speed
- Onchain Gaming: Massively multiplayer games become viable when transaction costs drop 45x and throughput increases 10-100x
- Supply Chain + IoT: Billions of IoT devices can write data onchain without overwhelming the network
- Tokenized Everything: JPMorgan’s MONY fund is just the start real estate, corporate bonds, commodities, private equity, all moving onchain
The Startup Founder’s Bet
Priya Desai, founder of a DeFi lending protocol that launched in 2023, described the shift:
“We’ve been designing around Ethereum’s limitations for three years. Gas fees spike, so we batch transactions hourly instead of instantly. Throughput caps, so we limit concurrent users. PeerDAS and ZK-EVMs remove those constraints. We’re literally rewriting our entire product roadmap because things we thought were impossible are suddenly trivial. It’s like going from dial-up to fiber internet overnight.”
The Verdict: Solved, or Solving?
Vitalik Buterin’s claim that Ethereum has solved the blockchain trilemma is technically accurate but temporally nuanced:
The more accurate framing: Ethereum has proven the trilemma can be solved and is actively deploying the solution across 2026-2030. It’s not “mission accomplished” it’s “moon landing successful, now building the colony.”
But here’s what matters most: The market is acting like it’s solved. JPMorgan isn’t tokenizing $100 million on Ethereum as an experiment it’s treating the blockchain as production infrastructure. Deutsche Bank isn’t building on ZKsync for fun. These institutions have compliance officers, risk committees, and boards of directors who demand provable reliability.
When trillion-dollar banks start moving real assets onchain, that’s the market’s verdict on whether the technology works.
As Buterin himself noted: Bitcoin gave us consensus and decentralization in 2009, but low bandwidth. Ethereum in 2026 delivers all three: decentralized, consensus, and high bandwidth.
