Author: Jack Inabinet Source: bankless Translation: Shan Ouba, Jinse Finance
While other public chains are chasing flashy metrics or lobbying for industry dominance, Ethereum has been steadily moving towards a different path.
That is building an indestructible blockchain space.
In today's world, governments' ability to monitor, restrict, and even block knowledge and finance has reached unprecedented levels, making the construction of highly resilient, trustless, and scalable financial infrastructure more critical than ever before.
The density of effective information on cryptocurrency Twitter has been exceptionally low in the past few months, but this week Vitalik shared a series of crucial insights, explaining Ethereum's core values and why its founding principles should be upheld even as it rapidly expands in the global financial sector.
Ethereum's construction logic is drastically different from its competitors, and exploring the reasons for its irreplaceable position in the industry can offer us many insights. Extreme Resilience As stated in the "Trustless Manifesto," "Ethereum was not created to improve financial efficiency or optimize application convenience, but to give humanity true freedom." Unlike many venture-backed competitors that pursue "optimization for optimization's sake," Ethereum upholds this philosophy, placing extreme resilience at the forefront of all goals. The network was designed to ensure that anyone in the world can access it permissionlessly, without relying on centralized intermediaries or fragile underlying infrastructure. While other public chain users have to accept network downtime as a normal part of on-chain life, Ethereum users have made an uncompromising demand of the network—never downtime. Ethereum has adhered to this standard for over a decade. Looking at the industry as a whole, the supply of blockchain space is not scarce, but blockchain space with decentralized, permissionless, and highly resilient attributes remains a scarce resource. Ethereum's priorities are very clear: uphold its core attributes first, then achieve scalability. To become a globally trustworthy and neutral settlement layer, Ethereum must guarantee stable operation around the clock, and its continued operation cannot rely on any single entity. Ethereum's technical architecture is carefully designed so that even if all core development work were to completely cease, it could permanently function as a reliable transaction intermediary. Vitalik previously stated that PeerDAS and zkEVM will help Ethereum gradually achieve a processing capacity of tens of thousands of transactions per second, but he also pointed out that a lot of work still needs to be done to pass the "off-grid testing." Specifically, this requires achieving the following goals: Achieve full quantum resistance as soon as possible to ensure the protocol's cryptographic system can be secure and trustworthy for a century.
Identify and implement some form of stateless solution, enabling Ethereum to operate at a throughput of tens of thousands of transactions per second for decades to come, while avoiding storage pressure and synchronization problems for validators.
Adopt a universal account standard to replace the current signature scheme, which is vulnerable to quantum attacks.
Ensure that the staking economic model and block building mechanism can withstand the risk of centralized network control in the long term.
Vitalik admitted that Ethereum has not yet fully achieved the ultimate form of "completely trustless," but through gradual upgrades over the next few years, the network will reach a new stage—"almost all subsequent innovations can be achieved through client-side optimizations."
Vitalik admitted that Ethereum has not yet fully achieved the ultimate form of "completely trustless," but through gradual upgrades over the next few years, the network will reach a new stage—"almost all subsequent innovations can be achieved through client-side optimizations."
Uncompromising Scalability Regardless of the underlying architecture of a blockchain, trade-offs must be made between decentralization, security, and scalability—an unavoidable reality. Ethereum, relying on a globally distributed network of diverse validator nodes, provides all users with a reliable experience of irreversible transactions. However, the industry has long believed that this world-class settlement capability inevitably comes at the cost of transaction speed and throughput. Now, Vitalik Buterin proposes that Ethereum, through advancing two core projects in its roadmap—Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS) and the Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM)—is poised to transform into "a more powerful decentralized network with a completely new architecture." In the Fusaka upgrade in December 2025, Ethereum successfully deployed peer-to-peer data availability sampling technology, significantly expanding the available data space for Rollups. Meanwhile, initial experiments with zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine nodes are expected to begin in 2026. Vitalik predicts that within the next four years, leveraging peer-to-peer data availability sampling and zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine technology, Ethereum will become the world's first network to overcome the "blockchain trilemma," creating a new paradigm where security, decentralization, and scalability no longer hinder each other but rather empower and synergize with one another. Vitalik's recent series of posts reminds us once again that resilience, trustlessness, and scalability are not merely marketing gimmicks for Ethereum. Ethereum's uniqueness lies in its unwavering commitment to its founding core values. These values have been openly belittled and even ridiculed by many rapidly rising competitors, but Ethereum has maintained its leading position and strong vitality after experiencing multiple industry cycles, narrative shifts, and policy changes. This precisely demonstrates the powerful strength of the concept of "adhering to faith." As the cryptocurrency industry increasingly approaches global recognition and mainstream application, all participants will be forced to confront the question—what exactly is their core value? Cheap block space is readily available, but block space with trustworthy neutrality, permissionless operation, and perpetual operation attributes is extremely rare. The fundamental reason why Ethereum can continue to occupy a core position in the industry is that every aspect of its architectural design is based on the unwavering principle of "perpetual operation."
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