Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the network was nearing a turning point as two major upgrades, PeerDAS and zkEVM, moved from research to working code.
In an article on
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He framed the problem through two models of the Internet age. Systems like BitTorrent can move huge amounts of data in a decentralized way, but they don’t need consensus. Bitcoin benefits from high decentralization and consensus, but it remains low bandwidth because each node efficiently double-checks the same work instead of dividing it.
The next phase of Ethereum, he said, will be about getting all three at once.
The first leg is already live. PeerDAS (data availability sampling) is now available on the Ethereum mainnet, allowing nodes to verify that data is available without downloading the full dataset.
PeerDAS is a prototype of Data Availability Sampling (DAS), essential for scaling Ethereum via sharding. It allows thin clients to check whether all partition data has been published by sampling small portions, significantly improving scalability while maintaining decentralization and security.
The second stage, zkEVM, is now “production quality over performance,” Buterin said, meaning the remaining work is about security and proving robustness at scale.
Buterin described this as a practical step toward solving the so-called “blockchain trilemma,” not as a theory, but through “live-running code,” adding that zkEVM nodes could begin appearing in limited form in 2026.
A longer-term goal is “distributed bloc building,” Buterin added, where no single party brings the entire bloc together in one place, thereby reducing censorship risks and improving geographic fairness.
The message is that Ethereum’s scaling roadmap is increasingly about dividing the verification work across the network, rather than asking each node to replicate everything.
