Vitalik Calls PeerDAS in Fusaka ‘Literally Sharding’

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently praised a new development in Ethereum’s roadmap — PeerDAS, part of the upcoming Fusaka upgrade. He described it as “literally sharding,” marking a significant step toward Ethereum’s long-term scalability goals.

Buterin highlighted that with PeerDAS (Peer-to-Peer Data Availability Sampling), no single node needs to process or see more than a tiny fraction of the entire blockchain data to reach consensus. This is a major breakthrough in making Ethereum more decentralized and scalable.

How PeerDAS Changes the Game

Traditionally, Ethereum nodes needed access to large amounts of data to validate the network, which placed heavy demands on hardware. PeerDAS introduces a novel way to distribute the data availability checks among many nodes.

This mechanism allows the network to achieve consensus efficiently, even if individual nodes only see small portions of the data. It’s a practical implementation of sharding, where the blockchain’s workload is split, reducing the pressure on any single participant.

PeerDAS will be introduced in the Fusaka upgrade, which is part of Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap. It aims to enhance Layer 2 performance by solving the data availability bottleneck, a common issue in rollups today.

What It Means for Ethereum’s Future

Vitalik’s statement signals confidence that Ethereum is on track to becoming more scalable without sacrificing decentralization. PeerDAS doesn’t just offload data—it allows Ethereum to scale securely and sustainably by lowering node requirements.

With the Fusaka upgrade, Ethereum takes another step closer to handling global-scale applications without centralizing power or compromising security.