Vitalik Buterin congratulated the zkSync airbender team on their milestone and declared the speed race for zkEVMs won, calling for a full pivot to formal verification of equivalence, prover cost bounds and proof system security.

According to @VitalikButerin, he is now more in favor of native rollups than before, signaling a shift in his view on Ethereum L2 architecture, source: @VitalikButerin, X post, Jan 19, 2026. He states that a native rollup precompile must run in either zk mode or optimistic mode, and that earlier ZK-EVMs were too immature for zk mode, which was a key reason for his prior opposition, source: @VitalikButerin, X post, Jan 19, 2026. For traders, this highlights Ethereum attention on native rollup precompiles and the zk versus optimistic design choice that L2 builders must account for when building on ETH, source: @VitalikButerin, X post, Jan 19, 2026.

According to the source, Vitalik Buterin said Ethereum is nearing a turning point with PeerDAS data availability sampling now live and zkEVMs in the alpha stage, describing a fundamentally new decentralized network design that can solve the blockchain trilemma. Source: Vitalik Buterin public statement, Jan 2026. For trading, these scaling milestones indicate lower data costs for Layer 2 rollups and higher throughput, dynamics that previously coincided with fee compression and increased L2 activity after the Dencun upgrade introduced EIP-4844. Source: Ethereum Foundation Dencun upgrade announcement, Mar 2024; Vitalik Buterin public statement, Jan 2026. Traders should monitor ETH spot and perpetual funding, L2 transaction counts, rollup fees, and gas consumption across zkEVM ecosystems as the market prices in the Ethereum scaling roadmap with PeerDAS. Source: Vitalik Buterin public statement, Jan 2026.

According to @GracyBitget, a recommended video clearly explains zero-knowledge proofs, and the key analogy is covered within the first 4.5 minutes. Source: https://twitter.com/GracyBitget/status/1989382332399448307 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOGdb1CTu5c For traders, ZK technology matters because ZK-rollups use validity proofs to verify off-chain execution on Ethereum L1, enabling lower fees and higher throughput that can shift activity to Layer-2 networks. Source: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/scaling/zk-rollups/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/scaling/rollups/ This proof approach secures major ecosystems such as StarkNet and Polygon zkEVM, with STRK and POL serving as network tokens for governance and staking within their respective architectures. Source: https://starknet.io/strk-token/ https://polygon.technology/solutions/polygon-zkevm https://polygon.technology/blog/the-pol-upgrade-is-live-on-ethereum-mainnet ZK-rollup adoption also affects ETH demand for proof verification and L2 cost/throughput dynamics as documented in Ethereum’s rollups design, making ZK literacy directly relevant to assessing token and network fundamentals. Source: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/scaling/rollups/