Ethereum is nearing a pivotal phase as two major scaling upgrades — PeerDAS and zkEVMs — transition from research concepts into live, working systems, according to co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
In a post on X, Buterin said the combination of the two technologies could push Ethereum into “a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of decentralized network” by addressing a long-standing limitation in blockchain design. Historically, networks have been forced to trade off between decentralization and consensus on one hand, and bandwidth and throughput on the other.
Buterin illustrated the issue by comparing two internet-era models. Peer-to-peer systems like BitTorrent can distribute large volumes of data in a decentralized way, but do not require consensus. Bitcoin, by contrast, achieves strong decentralization and consensus but remains low-bandwidth because each node independently verifies the same work rather than sharing it across the network.
Ethereum’s next stage, Buterin said, aims to achieve all three: decentralization, consensus, and high throughput.
One component of that vision is already live. PeerDAS, a form of data availability sampling, has been deployed on Ethereum’s mainnet, allowing nodes to verify that transaction data is available without downloading it in full. The system serves as a prototype for full Data Availability Sampling, a core requirement for Ethereum’s long-term sharding-based scaling strategy.
By allowing light clients to confirm that shard data has been published through small random samples, PeerDAS significantly improves scalability while preserving security and decentralization.
The second component, zkEVMs, has reached what Buterin described as “production-quality” performance. The remaining work now centers on safety, reliability, and demonstrating robustness at scale rather than raw speed.
Buterin framed the progress as a concrete step toward resolving the so-called blockchain trilemma through “live running code,” rather than theory. He added that zkEVM nodes could begin appearing in limited form as early as 2026.
Looking further ahead, Buterin pointed to “distributed block building” as a longer-term goal, where block construction is spread across multiple participants instead of being handled by a single entity. Such an approach could reduce censorship risks and improve geographic fairness across the network.
Overall, Buterin’s message was that Ethereum’s scaling roadmap is increasingly focused on distributing verification work across the network, rather than requiring every node to process and recheck the full set of data.
