The blockchain trilemma: What limits development of crypto networks

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The blockchain trilemma

What the trilemma looks like in practice

Bitcoin is a classic example of how the trilemma plays out in real life. Its architecture is designed primarily around security and decentralization. Anyone can run a node, the rules are simple and immutable, and transaction history is nearly impossible to rewrite. The cost of this design choice is scalability. Low throughput and high fees during periods of congestion are not bugs, but consequences.

Ethereum followed a similar path. In its early years, it also deliberately sacrificed scalability in favor of decentralization and security. This became evident during every hype cycle, from ICOs to NFTs, when the network would simply choke under demand. That was when the idea that Ethereum “does not scale” took hold, even though in reality it was not trying to solve everything at a single layer.

Solana, by contrast, is often cited as an example of shifting the balance toward scalability. High throughput and low fees have made it attractive to users and developers. However, these advantages come at the cost of high hardware requirements for nodes and a more complex architecture, which periodically leads to outages and raises questions about the network’s true level of decentralization.

None of these examples are good or bad. They simply illustrate how the trilemma forces projects to make trade-offs.

Why the trilemma remained unsolved for years

The main reason is that the trilemma was never a technical problem in the traditional sense. It is not a bug or a lack of optimization. It is a consequence of trying to combine too many functions within a single blockchain layer: consensus, transaction execution, data storage, and security.

Any attempt to speed up the network at this level inevitably led either to a reduction in the number of independent participants or to increased risks. As a result, most promises to “solve” the trilemma remained either theoretical, confined to white papers, or limited to experimental networks.

How Ethereum approached the trilemma

Instead of trying to break the trilemma in one place, Ethereum began distributing it across layers. The idea was simple, though for a long time impractical: keep decentralization and security at the base layer while moving scalability to higher layers.

This is where PeerDAS and zkEVM come in, two components that Vitalik Buterin now points to as evidence that the trilemma is no longer a fundamental constraint. PeerDAS, introduced in the Fusaka upgrade, addresses the problem of data availability. It allows the network to transmit significantly more data without requiring every node to store everything in full. This removes one of the key bottlenecks to scaling without introducing centralization.

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zkEVM, in turn, shifts transaction execution into a zero-knowledge environment. Transactions can be processed outside the main chain, while their correctness is still verified by Ethereum. In this way, scaling does not undermine the security of Layer 1 but instead relies on it.

Why Buterin says the trilemma is solved

When Vitalik Buterin talks about a solved trilemma, he is not claiming that Ethereum is already perfect. His argument is different: the limitation is no longer architectural. Part of the solution is already live on mainnet, while the other part is production-ready from a performance standpoint, though it still requires further security improvements.

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He also speaks openly about the timeline. Full implementation of this model will take several more years, extending toward the end of the decade. What matters, however, is that this is not a hypothesis but a gradual rollout already underway.

What this means for the industry

If Buterin is right, the trilemma stops being a universal excuse. It does not disappear, but it ceases to be a verdict. The question is no longer what to sacrifice, but how to distribute complexity across the layers of the system.

This does not make all blockchains the same, nor does it eliminate competition. But it does shift the point of reference. Where speed and decentralization once seemed mutually exclusive, they now become questions of architecture, time, and discipline in execution.

Perhaps Ethereum has not abolished the trilemma but has shown that it was the result of early design choices rather than an unavoidable limitation of blockchains.

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