Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the network is approaching a tipping point as two major upgrades, PeerDAS and zkEVM, move from research to working code.
In a post on
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He posed the problem through two models of the Internet era. Systems like BitTorrent can move huge amounts of data in a decentralized way, but they don’t need consensus. Bitcoin has strong decentralization and consensus, but maintains low bandwidth because each node effectively re-verifies the same work instead of splitting it.
Ethereum’s next phase, he said, is to achieve all three at once.
The first leg is now live. PeerDAS (Data Availability Sampling) is now on the Ethereum mainnet, allowing nodes to verify that data is available without downloading the entire data set.
PeerDAS is a Data Availability Sampling (DAS) prototype, which is essential for scaling Ethereum via sharding. It allows light clients to check whether all data in shards has been published by sampling small chunks, which greatly improves scalability while maintaining decentralization and security.
The second pillar, zkEVMs, is now “performance-based production quality,” Buterin said, meaning the remaining work is security and demonstrating robustness at scale.
Buterin described this as a practical step towards solving the so-called “blockchain trilemma”, not as a theory, but through “live running code”, adding that zkEVM nodes could start appearing on a limited basis in 2026.
A longer-term goal is “distributed block building,” Buterin added, where no party brings the entire block together in one place, reducing censorship risks and improving geographic fairness.
The message is that Ethereum’s scaling roadmap is increasingly about dividing verification work across the network, rather than asking each node to replicate everything.
