A decade of debate comes to an end: How third-party verification helps Ethereum break through the three major dilemmas

In the ten years of upheaval in the crypto world, the term “trilemma” has haunted every developer like a ghost. However, as the timeline advances into early 2026, third-party validators are witnessing this once seemingly insurmountable dilemma gradually transforming into a “design threshold” that can be alleviated through technological innovation. Recently, Vitalik Buterin’s remarks have reignited industry imagination about the conclusion of this decade-long debate: compared to simply reducing latency, increasing network bandwidth is safer and more reliable. Through PeerDAS and zero-knowledge proof technologies, Ethereum’s scalability can achieve thousands of times growth, and this does not fundamentally conflict with decentralization of validation.

So, can the so-called physical law of the trilemma truly dissipate with the maturation of PeerDAS, ZK tech, and account abstraction? More importantly, what roles will third-party node operators and validators play in this technological revolution?

The Root of the Trilemma: Why Decentralized Validation Becomes a Third-Party Dilemma

To understand the predicament faced by third-party validators, we first need to revisit Vitalik’s “Blockchain Trilemma”—a concept used to describe the dilemma that public chains struggle to balance security, scalability, and decentralization simultaneously.

Specifically, the definitions of these three dimensions vary:

• Decentralization means low participation barriers for nodes, broad third-party involvement, and trustlessness towards a single entity.
• Security means the system maintains integrity against malicious behaviors, censorship, and technical attacks.
• Scalability means high transaction throughput, low confirmation latency, and good user experience.

The crux of the problem is that these three often conflict under traditional architectures. Improving throughput usually requires higher hardware thresholds or centralized coordination—directly discouraging third-party participation; reducing node burdens may weaken security assumptions; insisting on extreme decentralization often sacrifices performance and user experience.

Looking back over the past five to ten years, different public chains have offered different answers—from early EOS to Polkadot, Cosmos, and the performance-focused Solana, Sui, Aptos, etc. Some sacrifice decentralization for performance; some improve efficiency via permissioned nodes or committee mechanisms; others accept performance gains while prioritizing free review and validation.

But the common fate is that almost all scaling solutions can only satisfy two of the three, inevitably sacrificing the third. In other words, these solutions repeatedly play within the logic of “single-layer blockchains”—if you want to run fast, you need stronger nodes; if you want many nodes, you must accept slower speeds. For third-party validators, this means either investing in more expensive equipment or gradually being marginalized.

However, if we carefully review Ethereum’s transition since 2020 from a “single chain” to a “rollup-centric” multi-layer architecture, and the recent maturation of supporting technologies like zero-knowledge proofs, we find an interesting turning point: the underlying logic of the “trilemma” has been gradually reconstructed through Ethereum’s modular development.

Breakthroughs in Technology: How PeerDAS and zkEVM Empower Third-Party Validation

Ethereum’s response to this challenge is not seeking a magical one-step solution, but rather advancing multiple technical paths in parallel, each decoupling the original constraints.

From full verification to sampling verification: PeerDAS’s decentralization breakthrough

In the trilemma, data availability often becomes the first bottleneck because traditional blockchains require every full node to download and verify all data. This guarantees security but also limits scalability, forcing third-party validators to invest enormous computational resources to keep up.

Ethereum’s approach is not to make nodes stronger but to fundamentally change how data is verified. PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling) embodies this idea:

It no longer requires each node to download all block data but instead verifies data availability through probabilistic sampling—block data is split and encoded, and nodes randomly sample parts of the data. If data is hidden or withheld, the probability of sampling failure rapidly increases, significantly boosting data throughput. More importantly, ordinary nodes can still participate fully in validation, meaning the participation threshold for third-party node operators is greatly lowered, rather than being forced out of the network.

Notably, Vitalik emphasizes that PeerDAS is no longer just a conceptual roadmap but a real deployed system component. This means Ethereum has taken a substantial step toward the “scalability × decentralization” boundary, reopening space for third-party validators.

From repetitive computation to zero-knowledge proofs: the zkEVM validation revolution

Besides solving data availability, Ethereum also aims to address the fundamental dilemma of “must every node re-execute all computations” through zero-knowledge proof-driven validation layers.

zkEVM’s core idea is to enable Ethereum mainnet to generate and verify zero-knowledge proofs. In other words, after executing each block, a mathematically verifiable proof can be produced, allowing other nodes to confirm correctness without re-executing all transactions. This has profound implications for third-party validators:

• Faster validation: Nodes no longer need to replay transactions; they only verify the zk-proof, greatly reducing hardware requirements.
• Lighter burden: Significantly lowers computational and storage pressures on full nodes, making participation easier for light clients and cross-chain validators, expanding third-party involvement.
• Stronger security: Compared to optimistic rollups, on-chain validity proofs are confirmed immediately, with higher tamper-resistance and clearer security boundaries.

Recently, the Ethereum Foundation officially released the L1 zkEVM instant proof standard, marking the first time zero-knowledge proof technology has been formally incorporated into mainnet-level planning. The technical roadmap aims to keep block proof latency within 10 seconds, with proof sizes under 300 KB, employing 128-bit security levels, and plans to enable household devices to participate in proof generation, lowering decentralization barriers for third-party involvement.

Multi-dimensional Progress: The Surge, The Verge, and Long-term Roadmaps

Beyond these core technologies, Ethereum’s roadmap—covering The Surge, The Verge, and other plans before 2030—continues to advance on multiple fronts: increasing blob throughput, restructuring state models, raising gas limits, improving execution layers, each step creating more friendly participation conditions for third-party validators.

Importantly, these upgrades are not isolated but intentionally designed as modular, stackable enhancements that reinforce each other. This reflects Ethereum’s engineering attitude toward the trilemma: not seeking a one-size-fits-all solution, but redistributing costs and risks through layered architecture adjustments, enabling third-party validators to participate actively and receive reasonable economic incentives.

The 2030 Vision: Minimal L1 and Prosperous L2 Ecosystem with Third-Party Participation

Based on current technological progress and roadmap, we can glimpse Ethereum’s development outline before 2030. These features collectively form the ultimate answer to the trilemma and also open new opportunities for third-party validators.

On the minimal L1 layer, Ethereum is gradually evolving into a stable, neutral base that solely provides data availability and settlement proofs. It no longer handles complex application logic, maintaining high security while significantly reducing hardware requirements for third-party node operators—ordinary users can even run full validation nodes at home.

On the L2 and interoperability layer, through EIL (Interoperability Layer) and fast finality rules, the fragmented L2 ecosystem is seamlessly integrated into a unified whole. From a user perspective, they perceive no chain existence, only experiencing tens of thousands of TPS and near-instant confirmation speeds. Behind the scenes, third-party validators run validation nodes across various L2s, ensuring overall ecosystem security.

Regarding validation thresholds, as state processing and light client tech mature, even mobile phones can participate in validation. This seemingly simple progress fundamentally secures the decentralization foundation—third-party validators are no longer passive participants but active, economically incentivized security guardians.

Exit Tests and Trust Mechanisms: The Final Challenge of Third-Party Autonomy

In this round of technological upgrades, Vitalik emphasizes a key standard called the “Walkaway Test”—Ethereum must possess genuine autonomous operation capability.

In other words, even if all service providers disappear or are attacked, DApps can still run, and user assets remain safe. This seemingly simple statement touches on Ethereum’s core design philosophy—without any centralized organization or commercial entity support, third-party validators must rely on their own strength to maintain the network’s health.

This effectively shifts the trust assessment from speed and user experience back to what Ethereum cares most about—whether the system remains trustworthy and independent of any single point of failure, even in worst-case scenarios. Broad participation of third-party validators is key to realizing this vision.

Final Words

Every era needs to view challenges through a developmental lens, especially in the rapidly evolving fields of Web3 and crypto.

Perhaps years from now, when people look back at the intense debates over the trilemma from 2020-2025, it will seem as if they were discussing how to make a carriage simultaneously fast, safe, and load-bearing before the invention of the automobile.

Ethereum’s answer is not to make painful trade-offs among the three vertices, but to build a digital infrastructure that belongs to everyone, maintained collectively by third parties, extremely secure, and capable of supporting all human financial activities—through PeerDAS, zero-knowledge proofs, and elegant economic design.

Every step forward in this direction is a step toward the end of the “trilemma” chapter.