Vitalik Buterin Says PeerDAS Is Ethereum’s Scaling Solution In Fusaka Upgrade

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says the upcoming Fusaka upgrade will hinge on a novel mechanism called PeerDAS, which enables nodes to verify data availability without downloading the full blockchain.

”It is the key to L2 scaling (and eventually L1 scaling),’’ Buterin said in a post on X. “PeerDAS is trying to do something pretty unprecedented: have a live blockchain that does not require any single node to download the full data.”

Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS) enables nodes to verify the existence of block data without downloading or storing it.

In an X post, Buterin explained that nodes fetch smaller chunks of data, then use erasure coding to reconstruct the rest.

The mechanism was introduced in Ethereum Improvement Proposal 7594 in January 2024 as a means to ensure that blob data is made available while downloading only a subset of the data.

“Providing additional data availability helps bring scale to Ethereum users in the context of layer two systems called ‘rollups’ whose dominant bottleneck is layer 1 data availability,” the EIP reads. 

Blob Count Hits New Levels As Fusaka Upgrade Aims To Double Targets

The X comments by Buterin came as he was responding to a post by the head of data at Dragnonfly, Hildebert Moulié, who noted that the network hit six blobs per block target for the first time on Wednesday.

Blobs (Binary Large Objects) are fixed-size packets of transaction data introduced in Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade, designed to give rollups cheaper temporary storage than regular calldata.

According to Moulié, the recent spike in blob usage is mainly driven by Coinbase Layer-2, Base, and Worldcoin. Base and World alone are consuming most of the available blob space, with Layer 2s collectively paying around $200,000 per week in mainnet fees. 

Meanwhile, the Fusaka upgrade, scheduled for December 3, will introduce EIP-7594 and double the blob capacity from its current target of 6/9 per block.

Buterin emphasized that the technology remains uncharted territory, noting that core developers are justified in being “extremely cautious with testing,” despite having spent years developing it.

“This is also why the blob count will increase conservatively at first, and then become more aggressive over time,” he added.