Written by: imToken

The term "impossible triangle" has probably become quite familiar to everyone, right?

In the first decade since the birth of Ethereum, the "impossible triangle" has hung over every developer like a physical law— you can choose any two out of decentralization, security, and scalability, but you can never have all three.

However, looking back from the beginning of 2026, we find that it seems to be gradually transforming into a "design threshold" that can be crossed through technological evolution. As Vitalik Buterin pointed out in a disruptive perspective on January 8: "Compared to reducing latency, increasing bandwidth is safer and more reliable. With the help of PeerDAS and ZKP, Ethereum's scalability can be increased by thousands of times without conflicting with decentralization."

Could the "impossible triangle," once deemed insurmountable, really dissipate in 2026 with the maturity of PeerDAS, ZK technology, and account abstraction?

1. Why has the "impossible triangle" been difficult to overcome for a long time?

We need to revisit the concept of the "blockchain impossible triangle" proposed by Vitalik Buterin, which was specifically used to describe the dilemma of public chains in achieving security, scalability, and decentralization simultaneously:

• Decentralization means low node thresholds, widespread participation, and no need to trust a single entity;
• Security means the system can maintain consistency while resisting malicious actions, censorship, and attacks;
• Scalability means high throughput, low latency, and a good user experience;

The problem is that these three often constrain each other under traditional architectures. For example, increasing throughput usually means raising hardware thresholds or introducing centralized coordination; reducing node burdens may weaken security assumptions; and insisting on extreme decentralization inevitably sacrifices performance and experience.

Over the past 5-10 years, from the early EOS to later Polkadot, Cosmos, and the performance-driven Solana, Sui, and Aptos, different public chains have provided different answers. Some choose to sacrifice decentralization for performance, some enhance efficiency through permissioned nodes or committee mechanisms, and others accept limited performance, prioritizing censorship resistance and verification freedom.

But the common point is that almost all scaling solutions can only satisfy two of the three, inevitably sacrificing the third.

In other words, almost all solutions are caught in the logic of "monolithic blockchains"—to run fast, nodes must be strong; to have many nodes, they must run slow, which seems to have become a deadlock.

If we temporarily set aside the debate over the pros and cons of monolithic versus modular blockchains and seriously review Ethereum's transition from a "monolithic chain" to a "Rollup-centric" multi-layer architecture development path in 2020, along with the recent maturity of supporting technologies like ZK (zero-knowledge proofs), we will find that:

The underlying logic of the "impossible triangle" has been slowly reconstructed in the past five years through Ethereum's modularization efforts.

Objectively speaking, Ethereum has decoupled the original constraints through a series of engineering practices. At least in terms of engineering pathways, this issue is no longer just a philosophical discussion.

2. Engineering solutions through "divide and conquer"

Next, we will break down these engineering details to see how Ethereum has advanced through multiple technical lines in parallel during the five years from 2020 to 2025 to dissolve this triangular constraint.

First, through PeerDAS, it achieves "decoupling" from data availability, liberating the inherent limits of scalability.

As we know, in the impossible triangle, data availability is often the first shackles determining scalability because traditional blockchains require every full node to download and verify all data, which limits scalability while ensuring security. This is why the last cycle (or the one before that) saw a boom in "heretical" DA solutions like Celestia.

Ethereum's direction is not to make nodes stronger but to change how nodes verify data, with PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling) as the core solution:

It no longer requires every node to download all block data but verifies data availability through probabilistic sampling—block data is split and encoded, and nodes only need to randomly sample part of the data. If data is concealed, the probability of sampling failure will quickly amplify, significantly increasing data throughput while allowing ordinary nodes to participate in verification. This means it does not sacrifice decentralization for performance but optimizes the cost structure for verification through mathematical and engineering design (see further reading: "Is the DA War Coming to an End? Deconstructing PeerDAS and How It Helps Ethereum Regain 'Data Sovereignty'").

Moreover, Vitalik emphasizes that PeerDAS is no longer just a concept in the roadmap but a real deployed system component, which means Ethereum has taken a substantial step towards "scalability × decentralization."

Secondly, zkEVM attempts to solve the problem of "whether each node must repeat all computations" through a verification layer driven by zero-knowledge proofs.

The core idea is to enable the Ethereum mainnet to generate and verify ZK proofs. In other words, after executing each block, it can output a verifiable mathematical proof, allowing other nodes to confirm the correctness of the results without repeating calculations. Specifically, the advantages of zkEVM focus on three aspects:

• Faster verification: Nodes do not need to replay transactions; they only need to verify zkProof to confirm block validity;
• Lighter burden: Effectively reduces the computational and storage pressure on full nodes, making it easier for light nodes and cross-chain validators to participate;
• Stronger security: Compared to the OP route, ZK state proofs are confirmed on-chain in real-time, with higher tamper resistance and clearer security boundaries;

Recently, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) officially released the L1 zkEVM real-time proof standard, marking the first formal inclusion of the ZK route in the technical planning at the mainnet level. Over the next year, the Ethereum mainnet will gradually transition to an execution environment that supports zkEVM verification, achieving a structural shift from "re-execution" to "verification proof."

Vitalik's assessment is that zkEVM has preliminarily reached a production-ready stage in terms of performance and functional completeness, with the real challenges focusing on long-term security and implementation complexity. According to the technical roadmap published by EF, the block proof delay target is controlled within 10 seconds, the size of a single zk proof is less than 300 KB, and it adopts a 128-bit security level, avoiding trusted setups and planning to allow household devices to participate in proof generation to lower the decentralization threshold (see further reading: "The 'Dawn Moment' of the ZK Route: Is Ethereum's Endgame Roadmap Accelerating?").

Finally, in addition to the above two items, there are also multi-dimensional expansions based on the Ethereum roadmap before 2030 (such as The Surge, The Verge, etc.) aimed at improving throughput, restructuring state models, raising gas limits, and improving execution layers.

These are paths of trial and error and accumulation in crossing traditional triangular constraints. It resembles a long-term mainline dedicated to achieving higher blob throughput, clearer Rollup division of labor, and more stable execution and settlement rhythms, laying the foundation for future multi-chain collaboration and interoperability.

Importantly, these are not isolated upgrades but are explicitly designed to be mutually reinforcing modules, which precisely reflects Ethereum's "engineering attitude" towards the impossible triangle: not seeking a magical solution that wins in one move like monolithic blockchains, but redistributing costs and risks through multi-layer architecture adjustments.

3. Vision for 2030: The ultimate form of Ethereum

Even so, we must remain restrained. Because elements like "decentralization" are not static technical indicators but long-term evolutionary results.

Ethereum is actually exploring the boundary constraints of the impossible triangle step by step through engineering practice—as verification methods (from re-computation to sampling), data structures (from state bloat to state expiration), and execution models (from monolithic to modular) change, the original trade-offs are shifting, and we are getting infinitely closer to that endpoint of "wanting, needing, and having."

In recent discussions, Vitalik also provided a relatively clear timeline:

• 2026: With improvements in some execution layer/building mechanisms and the introduction of directions like ePBS, the gas limit not relying on zkEVM can be raised first, while creating conditions for "more widely running zkEVM nodes";
• 2026–2028: Adjustments around gas pricing, state structure, and execution load organization will enable the system to maintain secure operation under higher loads;
• 2027–2030: As zkEVM gradually becomes an important way to verify blocks, the gas limit may be further increased, with the long-term ideal goal pointing towards more distributed block construction;

Combining the recent roadmap updates, we can glimpse three key features of Ethereum before 2030, which together constitute the ultimate answer to the impossible triangle:

• Minimalist L1: L1 becomes a solid, neutral layer responsible only for providing data availability and settlement proofs, no longer handling complex application logic, thus maintaining extremely high security;
• Prosperous L2 and interoperability: Through EIL (interoperability layer) and rapid confirmation rules, fragmented L2s are stitched together into a whole, users are unaware of the existence of chains, only feeling the TPS at the level of hundreds of thousands;
• Extremely low verification threshold: Due to the maturity of state processing and light client technologies, even mobile phones can participate in verification, ensuring that the foundation of decentralization remains rock solid;

Interestingly, just as this article was being written, Vitalik once again emphasized an important testing standard—the "Walkaway Test," reiterating that Ethereum must have the ability to operate autonomously, even if all service providers disappear or are attacked, DApps can still run, and user assets remain secure.

This statement actually pulls the evaluation scale of this "ultimate form" back from speed/experience to the most important thing for Ethereum—whether the system remains trustworthy and does not rely on a single point in the worst-case scenario.

In Conclusion

One must always look at issues with a developmental perspective, especially in the rapidly changing industry of Web3/Crypto.

I also believe that many years from now, when people reflect on the intense debates about the impossible triangle from 2020 to 2025, they may feel it was akin to serious discussions about "how carriages could balance speed, safety, and load" before the invention of the automobile.

Ethereum's answer is not to make painful choices between the three vertices but to build a digital infrastructure that belongs to everyone, is extremely secure, and can support the financial activities of all humanity through PeerDAS, ZK proofs, and ingenious economic game design.

Objectively speaking, every step taken in this direction is a step on the endpoint of the past of the "impossible triangle."

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