With Fusaka on Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin's dream comes true

Source: Criptonoticias Original Title: With Fusaka on Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin’s Dream Comes True Original Link:

Fusaka: A Fundamental Milestone in Ethereum’s Sharding

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, spoke out minutes after the launch of Fusaka, the latest network upgrade. This marks the second hard fork for Ethereum this year, following Pectra, which was implemented in May.

Fusaka introduced the data verification system known as PeerDAS (Peer-to-Peer Data Availability Sampling). For Vitalik, this mechanism represents the missing core component for Ethereum to achieve its true data sharding model, a goal set since 2015.

Sharding has been a goal for Ethereum since 2015, and data availability sampling since 2017, and now we’ve achieved it.

( How PeerDAS Works

Buterin recalled that the network aimed to split information into shards so that no node would have to download and check all the data. That idea could only work if there was a technique capable of guaranteeing that each shard was available and intact without every node fully verifying it. That method is precisely what PeerDAS provides.

With PeerDAS, the network can reach consensus on blocks even if no individual node sees all the data. Instead, each node takes small, random parts and verifies them through a probabilistic process. If all samples match, it can be inferred that the block is complete and accessible.

According to Buterin, this approach is even resistant to 51% attacks, since verification occurs on the client side and does not depend on validator voting.

) Benefits for the Network

The contribution is substantial. Sharding has always sought to allow more users to operate nodes without expensive hardware, but to achieve this, a system was needed that could ensure the availability of fragmented data without compromising security.

PeerDAS fulfills that role: it reduces the amount of information each node must check while still maintaining strong cryptographic guarantees about block integrity. In practice, this significantly decreases the bandwidth and processing requirements for nodes.

Moreover, it creates room for second-layer networks ###L2### to increase their operational capacity without overloading Ethereum’s main layer (L1). By increasing data availability within L1, PeerDAS means L2s will now be less dependent on external companies to store their data.

( Three Pending Limits on the Path to Complete Sharding

Despite the progress, Buterin noted that Fusaka has three aspects where sharding remains incomplete.

The first relates to the available power for L2s:

Today, L2 networks can already increase their capacity because PeerDAS reduces the amount of data each node must verify. This allows the total transaction volume to grow proportionally to the square of the computational power available per node.

However, this benefit does not extend to Ethereum’s main layer, as it remains limited by the need to execute all operations directly. For L1 to scale equivalently, Buterin stated that Ethereum-compatible virtual machines capable of generating zero-knowledge cryptographic proofs )ZK### are necessary. These proofs condense thousands of operations into a single verifiable proof, making it possible to validate a large set of transactions without reprocessing them on each node.

The second limit is the so-called bottleneck between proposer and block builder:

In the current architecture, the block builder must access all the data and assemble the complete block before the proposer publishes it. Vitalik Buterin suggested that a distributed block assembly would be ideal, where multiple actors build parts, avoiding reliance on a single operator. This idea aims to reduce centralization risks in the block-building market, a sector currently dominated by a few participants.

The third pending point is the absence of a sharded mempool:

The mempool is the space where transactions wait before being included in a block. For Buterin, this sharding is necessary to complete the sharding vision, as it would allow the pre-block flow to also be split and scaled.

( Future Perspectives

Despite these limitations, Buterin described the arrival of Fusaka as a fundamental step in blockchain design. He made clear the priorities for the next two years:

Refine the PeerDAS mechanism, carefully increase its scale, ensure its stability, use it to scale L2s, and when ZK-EVMs are mature, apply it internally to scale Ethereum L1 gas as well.

The co-founder closed his message with explicit recognition of the sustained work of Ethereum’s core researchers and developers, who have advanced for nearly a decade to achieve this goal.