## The Holy Grail Dilemma of Ethereum: From Technological Breakthroughs to Ideological Risks

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently published a lengthy post on social media platform X, claiming that Ethereum achieved a critical technological breakthrough in 2025. However, this was followed by deeper ideological issues. This is not simply a technical victory but a ideological battle concerning the future direction.

In the article, Buterin warns that the blockchain industry is facing a crossroads: whether to chase speculative waves (political memecoins, tokenized dollars, etc.) or to return to the original goal of the "neutral world computer." The underlying reflection of this warning is the fundamental problem that has plagued blockchain for over a decade—the ultimate solution to the scalability trilemma.

## The Scalability Trilemma Finally Broken

For a long time, blockchain developers believed that a network could only achieve two of the three: decentralization, security, and scalability. Buterin now claims that this era has ended, not only in theory but in "actual running code."

Ethereum has achieved this breakthrough through two major technologies:

**PeerDAS** (Data Availability Sampling) is now live on the mainnet, balancing decentralization and data availability. This means ordinary users can easily run nodes without requiring massive hardware resources.

**ZK-EVM** (Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine) has reached production-level performance, with some networks expected to activate it in 2026. It uses zero-knowledge proof technology to make verification more efficient while maintaining full decentralization.

Buterin explains this achievement with a historical analogy: BitTorrent (2000) had high bandwidth but no consensus mechanism, Bitcoin (2009) had decentralized consensus but low bandwidth. Ethereum in 2025 combines the advantages of both—supporting decentralization, consensus, and high bandwidth simultaneously. This marks the first realization of the Holy Grail.

## From Technological Achievement to Ideological Risks

Buterin emphasizes that technological breakthroughs are just the first step. He introduces the concept of the "walkaway test"—whether an application can continue to operate even if the original developers disappear. True decentralization involves not only the blockchain layer but also the overall ecosystem of applications and infrastructure.

He warns that many applications, although using decentralized protocols, still rely on centralized services. This is a weakness that new infrastructure must eliminate. For Ethereum to succeed, it must meet both global accessibility and true decentralization, rather than becoming a tool for financial speculation.

## Implementation Challenges of the Four-Year Roadmap

From 2026 to 2030, Ethereum plans to implement a series of major upgrades:

- **2026**: Significantly increase gas limits, allowing users to run ZK-EVM nodes for the first time, marking the start of technological democratization.
- **2026-2028**: Implement gas price rebalancing and network state structure changes, with effective payloads entering the "blobs" storage scheme.
- **2027-2030**: Further increase gas limits, with ZK-EVM becoming the primary method for block validation.

These changes represent a fundamental shift in Ethereum's validation mechanism from repetitive computation to zero-knowledge proof systems. But Buterin explicitly states that this is not a "minor improvement" but a multi-year effort toward a "completely new and more powerful decentralized network."

## The Ultimate Vision of the Holy Grail

In addition to recent scalability plans, Buterin also envisions a long-term ideal: **Distributed Block Construction**. The goal is to make complete transaction blocks "never assembled in a single location." Although this may not be necessary in the short term, it reflects Ethereum’s unwavering pursuit of thorough decentralization.

Through "on-protocol" methods (such as expanding the FOCIL mechanism) or "off-protocol" methods (such as distributed builder markets), Ethereum can reduce the risks of centralized intervention in real-time transactions while creating a "better geographical fairness environment."

## The Substance of Ideological Risks

Buterin’s message is essentially a correction of perspective. Technologically, the scalability trilemma has been solved, removing the engineering excuses previously used to justify centralization. But ideologically, the real test has only just begun—whether the community will leverage this power to build a "world computer" passing the walkaway test or continue chasing the next market cycle’s economic signals.

This is the deeper meaning of the Holy Grail Dilemma: the unification of the technological Holy Grail, the ideological Holy Grail, and the ecological Holy Grail. The former has been achieved; the latter two are the key tests for the next four years.