Vitalik Buterin calls Fusaka's PeerDAS the factor Ethereum has been waiting for since 2015

Source: CritpoTendencia Original Title: Vitalik Buterin calls Fusaka’s PeerDAS the factor Ethereum has been waiting for since 2015 Original Link: Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, celebrated the activation of PeerDAS in the Fusaka upgrade on X this Wednesday. He called this improvement the network’s “true sharding” dream since 2015.

In a post on the social network, he pointed out that Ethereum can now reach consensus on which blocks are valid without any node having to view all the full data of every block. This opens the door to a faster, cheaper, and more decentralized network.

Interestingly, this system does not rely on most validators “voting correctly,” but instead on every user being able to probabilistically verify data availability themselves. This makes it difficult for even a 51% attack to succeed against data availability.

Buterin has been discussing this topic since 2017, when he published technical articles about “data availability and erasure coding.” The core problem: while there are fraud proofs to show a block is invalid, these proofs are useless if an attacker simply does not publish all the data. If parts of a block are missing, other validators cannot reconstruct the state or interact with that part of the network.

Additionally, it is hard to punish those who “don’t publish data,” because from the outside it isn’t always clear whether it’s a malicious publisher or a node making false accusations. This breaks incentive mechanisms and could turn the system into one of false alarms, denial of service attacks, or chaos relying only on altruistic actors.

PeerDAS solves this by having all light nodes participate in probabilistic data availability verification before accepting a block.

PeerDAS in Fusaka is important because it is literally sharding. Ethereum is reaching consensus on blocks without any single node seeing more than a small part of the data. This is robust to 51% attacks—it’s client-side probabilistic verification, not… —vitalik.eth

Why is Fusaka’s PeerDAS important?

Thanks to Fusaka and PeerDAS, Ethereum can scale better through layer 2 (L2) solutions like rollups. Data from these L2s is stored as blobs, no longer requiring full downloads by everyone, but rather is sampled. This reduces hardware requirements for nodes and allows more participants to join validation.

However, Buterin himself admits there are three incomplete points:

• The major scalability leap is more noticeable in L2s, not on the main layer (L1). For L1 to handle more transactions, a mature ZK-EVM is needed.
• Block builders still need to see all data to assemble blocks. The future goal is distributed block construction.
• There is still no sharded mempool; that is, the pending transaction system has not yet been divided by shards.

The expert sees this as a foundational step in blockchain design. The next few years will be used to fine-tune PeerDAS, gradually increasing capacity, and, when ZK-EVM is ready, use the same ideas to increase available gas on L1.