Breaking through the equilateral triangle: Ethereum is breaking a decade-long impossible debate

If in a previous era, the “Impossible Triangle” was considered a physical law hanging over every blockchain developer — you could only choose two out of decentralization, security, and scalability — today, Ethereum is gradually breaking through this “equilateral triangle” through technological evolution. In early 2026, Vitalik Buterin explicitly stated that, with the support of PeerDAS and ZKP, Ethereum’s scalability could increase by thousands of times while maintaining full decentralization.

Why has the equilateral triangle remained an unbreakable limit for so long?

To understand this triad constraint, we need to revisit the concept of the “Blockchain Scalability Trilemma” proposed by Vitalik Buterin. These three factors are clearly defined:

• Decentralization: Low node participation threshold, wide user base, no need to trust a single entity
• Security: The system maintains consistency against malicious behavior, censorship, and attacks
• Scalability: High throughput, low latency, good user experience

The core issue is that these three factors in traditional architectures often conflict with each other. Increasing throughput typically requires more powerful hardware or centralized coordination; reducing the burden on nodes can weaken security assumptions; maintaining extreme decentralization often sacrifices performance.

Over the past 5-10 years, various public blockchains have offered different answers: EOS in its early days sacrificed decentralization for performance; Polkadot and Cosmos improved efficiency through permissioned or committee-based mechanisms; Solana, Sui, Aptos pursue maximum performance; some platforms accept limited performance to prioritize censorship resistance. In summary, most scaling solutions can only satisfy two of the three factors simultaneously, inevitably sacrificing the third. They face a deadlock in the “single-blockchain” logic — to run fast, nodes must be powerful; to have many nodes, they must run slowly.

However, considering Ethereum’s development path from a “single-blockchain” to a multi-layer architecture centered on Rollups, combined with the maturity of ZK (Zero-Knowledge Proofs), a completely different picture emerges: The fundamental logic of the “Impossible Triangle” is being reconstructed through Ethereum’s modular evolution. Ethereum is not seeking a magic one-shot solution like some single-layer blockchains, but adjusting its multi-layer architecture to redistribute costs and risks.

Three core technologies: How Ethereum is “escaping” the triangle

First is PeerDAS — Liberating the triangle from the Data Availability aspect

In the traditional impossible triangle, data availability is the first chain that determines scalability. Conventional blockchains require each full node to download and verify all data, limiting scalability. Instead of making nodes more powerful, Ethereum changes how nodes verify data through PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling).

The core idea is: Block data is split and encrypted, and nodes only need to randomly sample parts of the data without downloading everything. If data is hidden or corrupted, the probability of sampling failure quickly amplifies. As a result, data throughput improves significantly, yet ordinary nodes can still participate in validation — not by sacrificing decentralization, but through mathematics and engineering design.

Vitalik emphasizes that PeerDAS is no longer a mere concept in the roadmap but a system component that has been practically deployed.

Second is zkEVM — Verification architecture that does not require re-execution

Through zkEVM, Ethereum aims to solve the problem of “whether each node must re-execute all computations.” The core idea is to enable verification based on zero-knowledge proofs (ZK Proofs) for the main Ethereum network.

After each block is executed, it produces a cryptographic proof that can be verified, allowing other nodes to confirm correctness without re-executing the computations. The advantages of zkEVM include:

• Faster verification: Nodes only verify zkProof instead of re-executing transactions
• Lighter load: Reduces computational pressure on full nodes, enabling lightweight nodes and cross-chain validators to participate more easily
• Stronger security: ZK state proofs are validated on-chain in real-time, with higher resistance to forgery

Recently, the Ethereum Foundation officially released the real-time proof standard for L1 zkEVM, marking the first time ZK pathways are formally integrated into the core network technical roadmap. Over the next year, mainnet will gradually transition to an execution environment supporting zkEVM verification.

According to the technical roadmap, the goal is to keep block proof latency within 10 seconds, with a single zk proof size under 300 KB, using 128-bit security level, avoiding trusted setup, and enabling household devices to participate in proof generation.

Third is long-term upgrades — Defining a clear development roadmap to 2030

Beyond the two points above, the Ethereum Foundation plans successive upgrades (The Surge, The Verge, etc.), focusing on increasing throughput, restructuring state models, adjusting Gas limits, and improving execution layers. These are all experimental and accumulative paths to overcome the traditional triangle limits.

Importantly, these are not isolated upgrades but are designed as modular, overlapping, and mutually reinforcing components.

Vision for 2030: When Ethereum fully breaks through the triangle

However, we must remain cautious. Because “decentralization” is not a static technical metric but a result of long-term evolution.

Ethereum is gradually exploring the boundaries of the impossible triangle through practical engineering. With changes in validation methods (from re-execution to sampling), data structures (from growing state to expiring state), and execution models (from monolithic to modular), the initial trade-offs are shifting.

We are approaching an infinite point of “wanting both, and also wanting both at the same time” — where decentralization, security, and scalability can coexist. With a clear roadmap outlined by Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation, the “equilateral triangle” once considered an insurmountable limit is now gradually becoming a “design threshold” that can be crossed through the combination of PeerDAS, zkEVM, and other successive upgrades.