TL;DR
- Scaling focus: Ethereum pairs production quality ZK-EVMs with PeerDAS on mainnet to pursue consensus driven high bandwidth at protocol level.
- Buterin contrasts Bittorrent’s consensus free bandwidth with Bitcoin’s low bandwidth consensus, positioning Ethereum between both models.
- Next steps prioritize safety, targeting full ZK-EVM in 2026, gas limit growth from 2027 to 2030, and distributed block building within regulation.
Ethereum is inching closer to a long promised scaling breakthrough, and Vitalik Buterin is framing the latest milestone as an architectural shift, not a single feature. He says zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines have reached production quality performance and that PeerDAS data availability sampling is live on mainnet. Together, consensus driven high bandwidth aims to let Ethereum move more data while keeping decentralized agreement at the core. Buterin argues this combination starts to resolve the long running tension between scale, security, and decentralization, while keeping performance upgrades grounded in protocol level changes. Cautious optimism is warranted.
Now that ZKEVMs are at alpha stage (production-quality performance, remaining work is safety) and PeerDAS is live on mainnet, it's time to talk more about what this combination means for Ethereum.
These are not minor improvements; they are shifting Ethereum into being a…
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) January 3, 2026
From Bandwidth Tradeoffs to a ZK-Ready Roadmap
To explain why he sees a structural change, Buterin contrasts Ethereum’s direction with older networking patterns. He points to Bittorrent as a bandwidth heavy peer to peer model that works without consensus, and to Bitcoin as the opposite, a consensus only system where replication stays low bandwidth. Ethereum, he argues, is moving toward high bandwidth with decentralized consensus by pairing data availability sampling with zero knowledge execution, so the network can scale throughput while still agreeing on state in a verifiable way. That blend aims to keep participation broad, not limited to a few operators.
Even with these pieces live, Buterin emphasizes that the next phase is about safety and hardening. He describes the remaining work as a push to ensure the system behaves reliably under stress, with full ZK-EVM deployment expected in 2026. Beyond that, he anticipates larger gas limit increases over a longer horizon, citing 2027 through 2030 as the window for scaling capacity further. The roadmap reads less like a sprint and more like a sequenced program, where performance gains arrive alongside careful validation and risk reduction. Upgrades should ship only when security margins are clearly proven.
A parallel track targets how blocks are built and who gets to influence ordering. Buterin outlines a path toward distributed block building that would minimize centralized control and improve geographic fairness, so Ethereum’s execution pipeline is not overly concentrated in a single region or small set of entities. The goal is to reduce chokepoints while preserving the benefits of coordination, which matters as bandwidth and activity rise. He also notes that these changes sit within applicable regulatory environments, signaling that technical design and operational realities will need alignment as the architecture evolves.
