Vitalik Buterin shared his vision of a new era of Ethereum scaling

Ethereum Co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently highlighted a turning point in the network’s development. According to him, two key technological upgrades — PeerDAS and zkEVM — are moving from the research phase to practical implementation, which could redefine blockchain capabilities as a whole.

In his address, Vitalik Buterin emphasized that this combination of technologies is not aimed at improving details but at fundamentally solving the historic contradiction of blockchains. It’s about the so-called trilemma: systems can be decentralized, have consensus, or high throughput, but achieving all three simultaneously has never been possible.

From Traditional Models to a New Architecture

Vitalik Buterin provided a clear comparison using examples from internet history. BitTorrent demonstrates how distributed systems transfer large volumes of data without central control, but do not require global consensus. Bitcoin, on the other hand, achieved a high degree of decentralization and consensus, but at the cost of low throughput: each node must re-verify all work instead of distributing it among participants.

Vitalik Buterin sees the next level of Ethereum evolution in achieving all three criteria simultaneously. The first steps have already been taken.

PeerDAS: Selective Verification Instead of Full Download

The Data Availability Sampling (DAS) technology, implemented as PeerDAS, is already functioning on the Ethereum mainnet. Its essence is revolutionary in its simplicity: instead of downloading and verifying full data sets, nodes can verify data availability by analyzing randomly selected fragments.

This allows light clients to ensure that all shard data is published while remaining resource-efficient. PeerDAS serves as the foundation for Ethereum sharding — a horizontal scaling strategy where network load is distributed across multiple parallel chains.

zkEVM: Readiness for Production Use

The second component — zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkEVM) — has reached a critical development milestone. According to Vitalik Buterin, the technology already meets production standards in terms of performance. Remaining work focuses on security issues and proof resilience during scaling.

These are not abstract promises but practical results: Vitalik Buterin clarified that zkEVM nodes could start appearing in limited form as early as this year.

Decentralized Block Production as the Next Frontier

Vitalik Buterin outlined a more distant goal — fully decentralized block production. In this model, no participant assembles a full block in one place, critically reducing censorship risks and ensuring geographic fairness in consensus formation.

Ethereum’s scaling roadmap is increasingly oriented toward distributing computational work across the network, instead of requiring each node to fully replicate all data. This fundamentally differs from the Bitcoin model, where versatility is achieved at the cost of centralized load.

Significance for the Industry

Vitalik Buterin’s position is important because it demonstrates a shift from theoretical models to working code. These updates are not short-term optimizations but a fundamental rethinking of how blockchains can simultaneously ensure security, decentralization, and scalability.

The realization of Vitalik Buterin’s vision could set a new standard for the entire digital asset ecosystem.