Buterin Sees Ethereum Breaking Bitcoin-Style Barriers as Scaling Technologies Advance

Ethereum is approaching a major milestone as two key upgrades — PeerDAS and zkEVMs — move from research into live deployment, co-founder Vitalik Buterin said.

In a post on X, Buterin described the upgrades as a potential step toward “a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of decentralized network,” addressing a long-standing blockchain tradeoff between decentralization, consensus, and throughput.

He compared the challenge to two internet-era systems: Peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent can move large volumes of data but do not require consensus, while Bitcoin ensures decentralization and consensus but remains low-bandwidth because every node verifies the same work. Ethereum’s next phase aims to combine all three.

PeerDAS, already live on Ethereum’s mainnet, enables nodes to verify transaction data without downloading it in full. Serving as a prototype for Data Availability Sampling, it is a core building block for Ethereum’s sharding-based scaling, allowing light clients to efficiently check shard data while preserving security and decentralization.

zkEVMs, the second upgrade, has reached production-quality performance, with remaining work focused on safety, robustness, and proving the technology at scale. Limited zkEVM nodes could appear in 2026.

Looking further ahead, Buterin highlighted distributed block building, where block assembly is spread across multiple participants to reduce censorship and improve geographic fairness.

Overall, Ethereum’s scaling roadmap is shifting toward distributing verification work across the network, boosting throughput while maintaining decentralization.