Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin announced the network has begun processing transactions using a form of sharding for the first time, a key step toward improving its scalability and security after nearly a decade of development.
The activation of PeerDAS in Fusaka means Ethereum now achieves consensus without any single node needing to see more than a small fraction of a block’s data. Buterin stated this development “literally is sharding.”
Buterin emphasized that this innovation makes the network robust against 51% attacks. It uses client-side probabilistic verification, moving away from relying on validators with full data access.
PeerDAS in Fusaka is significant because it literally is sharding.
Ethereum is coming to consensus on blocks without requiring any single node to see more than a tiny fraction of the data. And this is robust to 51% attacks – it's client-side probabilistic verification, not… pic.twitter.com/OK81xBteER— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) April 17, 2024
This advancement primarily benefits Layer 2 (L2) networks. PeerDAS enhances data availability for rollups, thereby increasing their capacity and reducing transaction costs.
The concept of sharding has been a long-standing goal for Ethereum, with discussions dating back to 2015. Buterin first introduced data availability sampling in technical documents in 2017.
While significant, Buterin acknowledged that the ideal sharding design is not yet complete. Current limitations include the Layer 1 (L1) not yet directly benefiting from this scalability, which will require the maturation of ZK-EVMs.
He also pointed to the bottleneck of the current block building process, which relies on a single constructor having all data. Buterin expressed hope for a future model of distributed block construction.
Additionally, Ethereum does not yet have a sharded mempool, meaning transactions are not organized into parallel channels.
Buterin expects the next two years will allow for the refinement and gradual scaling of PeerDAS, ensuring network stability. The ultimate goal is to leverage L2 growth and, with mature ZK-EVMs, apply this capacity “inward” to increase L1 gas availability.
Ethereum’s chosen scalability model, centered on L2s, allows it to maintain a single global state. This approach maximizes composability between applications, unlike other chains that opt for multiple independent states.
The community views this as a validation of their strategy: a rollup ecosystem that inherits security from the base layer, now bolstered by tangible improvements in data availability. Buterin thanked the researchers and developers who worked for years to build the components enabling PeerDAS.