Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has said that Fusaka’s PeerDAS aims to increase blob capacity by sampling data rather than requiring any node to download it all. He added that developers will scale cautiously. The statement was made on X.
“Fusaka will fix this,” said Buterin. “safety first is of the utmost importance for Fusaka. The core feature, PeerDAS, is trying to do something pretty unprecedented: have a live blockchain that does not require any single node to download the full data. The way PeerDAS works is that each node only asks for a small number of ‘chunks’, as a way of probabilistically verifying that more than 50% of chunks are available.”
Fusaka is an upcoming Ethereum protocol upgrade centered on PeerDAS, a peer-to-peer data availability sampling design. According to the announcement, instead of every node downloading full blob data, nodes request small randomized chunks to verify availability. This enables higher blob targets without proportionally increasing hardware demands. Developers have signaled a safety-first approach: initial blob counts will rise conservatively and then ramp up as testing proves reliability and decentralization hold.
The Ethereum Foundation announced that Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade was activated on March 13, 2024. It introduced EIP-4844 “blob” transactions to lower Layer 2 (L2) costs and lay the groundwork for full danksharding. Blobs store data ephemerally in consensus clients, with commitments accessible to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). This separation makes rollup data cheaper while preserving verifiability. Dencun’s mainnet timing and purpose were formally announced by the foundation, establishing the baseline that Fusaka intends to scale further via PeerDAS.
PeerDAS relies on erasure coding and probabilistic sampling; if more than 50% of chunks are available, nodes can reconstruct the full dataset from the available parts. Research posts from core contributors outline distribution and sampling phases that collectively provide strong guarantees of availability under adversarial conditions.
Buterin is a Canadian programmer and writer best known as a co-founder of Ethereum. Active in crypto since 2011, he co-founded Bitcoin Magazine and helped launch Ethereum in 2015, shaping its roadmap toward scalability and security through proposals like rollups, proto-danksharding, and data availability sampling.
Ethereum is a decentralized platform for programmable smart contracts and applications secured by a global network of validators. The protocol supports tokens, decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and DA-layer services for rollups. Upgrades such as Dencun (EIP-4844 blobs) and planned steps like PeerDAS target massive throughput gains without sacrificing decentralization by keeping validation accessible.
