Vitalik Buterin Discusses Ethereum's Transition with ZK-EVM and PeerDAS

According to Odaily, Vitalik Buterin has announced that the ZK-EVM has entered the alpha stage, achieving production-level performance, with remaining efforts focused on security. Concurrently, PeerDAS has been officially launched on the Ethereum mainnet. Buterin emphasized that this is not a gradual optimization but a transformation of Ethereum into a new peer-to-peer network that combines decentralization, consensus mechanisms, and high bandwidth. Reflecting on past technologies, Buterin noted that BitTorrent offered high bandwidth without consensus, while Bitcoin had consensus but limited bandwidth due to full replication. With the introduction of PeerDAS (data availability sampling) and ZK-EVM, Ethereum aims to achieve decentralization, consensus, and high throughput simultaneously, overcoming the trilemma through "real code running on the mainnet." PeerDAS is already operational on the mainnet, and ZK-EVM has reached production-level performance. Buterin anticipates that starting in 2026, mechanisms like BAL and ePBS will gradually increase the Gas limit, creating opportunities to run ZK-EVM nodes. Between 2026 and 2028, there will be adjustments in Gas repricing, state structure, and execution load entering blobs. By 2027 to 2030, ZK-EVM is expected to become the primary method for network block verification, further driving Gas limit increases. Additionally, Buterin highlighted the importance of distributed block construction, with a long-term goal to prevent blocks from being fully constructed at any single location. This aims to decentralize block construction power through both protocol-internal and external methods, reducing the risk of centralized interference and enhancing geographical fairness.