The post PeerDAS data availability and ZK EVMs appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Recent upgrades are quietly redefining ethereum scalability as the network transitions into a more efficient and secure infrastructure layer for global value transfer. A decade-long push to resolve the blockchain trilemma For ten years, Ethereum has tried to solve a problem many thought impossible: maintaining decentralization, preserving strong consensus, and increasing capacity without sacrificing security. This challenge, often called the blockchain trilemma, has guided most of the protocol’s roadmap and design debates since 2015. However, that debate is now moving from theory into practice. According to cofounder Vitalik Buterin, the balance between decentralization, security, and throughput is no longer an abstract target. With PeerDAS live on mainnet and ZK EVMs reaching alpha maturity, Ethereum is starting to function as a fundamentally new kind of decentralized infrastructure. From replication to true distribution Buterin frames this shift by looking back at earlier peer-to-peer systems. BitTorrent proved a network could be highly decentralized and move huge volumes of data. However, it lacked a shared, tamper-resistant state. There was no global ledger, only file sharing without a canonical version everyone agreed on. Bitcoin then introduced strong consensus around a single ledger, so all participants could agree on balances and transactions. That said, Bitcoin kept network bandwidth low by having every node replicate the same work and data. This design favors security but caps throughput because all nodes must process and store everything. Ethereum’s new stack aims to combine the best of both approaches. PeerDAS, short for peer data availability sampling, allows nodes to verify that necessary data exists without downloading every byte. Moreover, this reduces resource requirements while maintaining robust guarantees that data is accessible to the network. At the same time, ZK EVMs – zero-knowledge Ethereum virtual machines – let blocks be verified using succinct mathematical proofs instead of re-executing all transactions. In…

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Filed under: News - @ January 5, 2026 5:26 pm