PeerDAS & ZKEVMs Mark Structural Changes in Ethereum, Says Vitalik

Key Highlights

Vitalik Buterin said PeerDAS and ZK-EVM progress together mark a shift in how Ethereum scales.
PeerDAS is live on mainnet, while ZK-EVMs have reached production-grade performance with wider use expected from 2026.
Ethereum plans higher gas limits in the coming years, with distributed block building remaining a long-term objective.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said in a recent post on X that Ethereum is moving into a new stage of its development, driven by two changes that are now real rather than theoretical. One is the launch of PeerDAS on the Ethereum mainnet. The other is that ZK-EVMs have reached production-level performance, even though they are still at an early, alpha stage.

Buterin’s point was not that Ethereum has simply become faster. He argued that the way Ethereum handles data and block validation is beginning to change, and that this alters the long-standing limits blockchains have worked under.

What problem Ethereum has been trying to solve

For years, blockchains have had to make trade-offs. Networks could be decentralized and secure, but slow. Or they could be fast, but rely on fewer participants and more central control.

Buterin explained this by comparing Ethereum with earlier peer-to-peer systems. BitTorrent managed to move large amounts of data in a decentralized way, but it had no shared agreement about the state. Bitcoin solved decentralized consensus, but did so by making every node repeat the same work, which kept throughput low.

Ethereum, he said, is now reaching a point where it can avoid that trade-off. “Now, Ethereum with PeerDAS (2025) and ZK-EVMs (expect small portions of the network using it in 2026), we get: decentralized, consensus and high bandwidth.”

What PeerDAS actually does

PeerDAS stands for Peer Data Availability Sampling. In simple terms, it changes how Ethereum checks that data exists and is accessible.

Instead of requiring every validator to download and store all the data attached to blocks, validators only check small, random parts. If the data were missing, this would be detected quickly. This allows Ethereum to carry much more data without forcing validators to run expensive hardware or large storage setups.

PeerDAS is already live on the mainnet, which means Ethereum is already using this approach today.

What ZK-EVMs change about validation

ZK-EVMs, or zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines, change how blocks are verified. Normally, validators re-run all the transactions in a block to check that it is correct. With ZK-EVMs, a validator can instead check a cryptographic proof that shows the block was executed correctly.

This reduces how much computation validators need to do. It also makes it possible to increase gas limits without overwhelming the network. Buterin said ZK-EVMs are now fast enough for real use, though more work is still needed to make them safe enough to rely on widely.

Why Buterin says the trilemma is no longer theoretical

Buterin stressed that this is no longer just a research idea. “The trilemma has been solved – not on paper, but with live running code.”

One half of this, data availability sampling, is already running on the Ethereum mainnet. The other half, ZK-EVMs, is already usable from a performance point of view, even if further safety improvements are needed.

He described this as the result of work that started nearly ten years ago, including early research into data availability and the first serious attempts to build ZK-EVMs around 2020.

What Ethereum’s path looks like from here

According to Buterin, the changes will not arrive all at once.

In 2026, Ethereum is expected to support higher gas limits without relying on ZK-EVMs, enabled by changes such as BALs and ePBS. Around the same time, it should become possible for some participants to run ZK-EVM nodes.

Between 2026 and 2028, Ethereum is expected to make further internal adjustments, including gas repricing, changes to how state is stored, and moving execution data into blobs, to make higher throughput safe.

From 2027 to 2030, Buterin expects ZK-EVMs to become the main way blocks are validated on the network, allowing for much larger increases in gas limits.

Vitalik added, “In 2027-30, large further gas limit increases, as ZKEVM becomes the primary way to validate blocks on the network.”

Block building and centralization risks

Buterin also addressed block building, which has increasingly become concentrated in a small number of hands. He said a long-term goal is to reach a point where a full block is never assembled in one place. He added, “The full block is never constituted in one single place.”

He noted that this is not something Ethereum needs immediately, but argued that moving in this direction would reduce the risk of censorship and improve fairness across different regions. He said this could happen either through changes built into the protocol, such as expanding FOCIL, or through distributed builder marketplaces operating outside the protocol.

What this means in practice

Buterin acknowledged that important challenges remain. ZK-EVMs still need further safety work. Higher gas limits increase complexity. Distributed block building is still a long-term aim rather than a near-term reality.

Even so, his post makes clear that Ethereum is no longer waiting for core research ideas to become practical. Key parts of that research are now live or close to being usable.

Rather than pointing to a single upgrade, Buterin described a gradual change in how Ethereum is designed to grow. If the roadmap plays out as expected, Ethereum could support far higher usage while keeping validation decentralized, something that has been difficult for blockchains to achieve until now.