Written by: Blockchain Knight
Ethereum founder Vitalik pointed out in a social media post reviewing 2025 that Ethereum has overcome the industry's long-standing scalability trilemma, achieving a major technological breakthrough. However, the network must choose between chasing speculative trends and fulfilling its original mission as a "neutral world computer."
He emphasized that the 2025 technological upgrade is not the end goal, but rather the foundation for resisting the centralized subscription-based internet.
Vitalik declared that the era of the scalability trilemma (the difficulty of balancing decentralization, security, and scalability) has ended, and this has been implemented in actual running code.
The core support stems from two major technological upgrades: PeerDAS is already live on the mainnet, and ZK-EVM has reached production-grade performance, with only final security checks remaining.
The integration of these two enables Ethereum to possess decentralization, consensus, and high bandwidth simultaneously. It not only enhances the network's processing capacity and reduces bottlenecks but also lowers the barrier for individuals to run nodes, without sacrificing the decentralized design. This marks the successful conclusion of a decade-long technological攻坚.
Vitalik positioned the upgraded Ethereum as a force against the centralization dilemma of the modern digital economy. He criticized the fragility of current internet tools that rely on third-party intermediaries and proposed the "unmaintained test" benchmark: even if the original developers disappear, Ethereum applications should be able to run without fraud or censorship.
This requires both the network and the applications built on it to achieve global availability and true decentralization, eliminating the vulnerabilities of current applications that depend on centralized services.
Vitalik also announced the roadmap leading up to 2030:
In 2026, technical adjustments will increase the gas supply limit, and ZK-EVM node operation will be opened;
From 2026 to 2028, gas pricing will be recalibrated, and payloads will be migrated to the efficient data storage solution "blobs";
From 2027 to 2030, ZK-EVM will become the primary method for block validation, achieving a significant increase in the gas limit and completing the fundamental shift from a replication model to a zero-knowledge proof system.
The long-term vision is "distributed modularity," which disperses block-building power to reduce the risk of centralized intervention and ensure fair network access for global users.
Vitalik's statement is both a report on technological progress and a philosophical correction: technology has removed the engineering excuses for centralization. The subsequent key lies in whether society will utilize this power to build a world computer that passes the "unmaintained test," rather than indulging in speculative cycles.
