Vitalik Buterin: Fusaka’s PeerDAS is the true sharding that Ethereum has been waiting for since 2015

Source: CryptoTendencia 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 within the Fusaka upgrade. He described this improvement as the true sharding the network has dreamed of since 2015.

According to Buterin, Ethereum can now agree on which blocks are valid without any node having to see all the full data of each block. This opens the door to a faster, cheaper, and more decentralized network.

Interestingly, this system does not depend on most validators “voting correctly,” but rather on each user being able to probabilistically verify on their own that the data is available. This makes even a 51% attack much harder to turn into a successful attack against data availability.

The problem PeerDAS solves

Buterin has been talking about this issue since 2017. The problem can be summarized as follows: although there are fraud proofs to show that a block is invalid, these are useless if the attacker simply does not publish all the data. If parts of the block are missing, other validators cannot reconstruct the state or interact with that part of the network.

Moreover, punishing those who “do not publish data” is difficult, because from the outside it’s not always clear whether it was a malicious publisher or a node making an accusation without cause. That breaks incentives and can turn the system into chaos with false alarms, denial of service attacks, or reliance only on altruistic actors.

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

Why is Fusaka’s PeerDAS important?

With Fusaka and PeerDAS, Ethereum can scale much better via second layers (L2), such as rollups. The data from these L2s is stored as blobs that no longer need to be fully downloaded by everyone, just sampled. This lowers hardware requirements for nodes and allows more actors to participate in validation.

However, Buterin himself acknowledges three points that are still incomplete:

• The big scalability leap is felt more on L2s than on the main layer (L1). For L1 to also process many more transactions, mature ZK-EVMs are needed.
• The block builder still needs to see all the data to assemble the block. The future goal is to have distributed block building.
• There is still no sharded mempool; that is, the pending transaction system is not yet divided by shards.

The expert sees this as a fundamental step in blockchain design. The coming years will serve to refine PeerDAS, gradually increase capacity, and when ZK-EVMs are ready, use those same ideas to also increase the available gas on L1.