Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the Ethereum Foundation’s longstanding shortfall in peer-to-peer (P2P) networking expertise — a tendency to “over-index” on cryptoeconomics, BFT consensus and block-layer work while taking the network layer for granted — has shifted, pointing to PeerDAS performance as proof. In a public post he singled out @raulvk and Foundation contributors for “heroic” work getting PeerDAS running and for producing a roadmap aimed at faster propagation, stronger resilience and improved network privacy.
What Buterin said (and where)
Buterin wrote on X that for years he had raised concerns internally at the Ethereum Foundation about limited P2P expertise, but that the picture “is no longer true” now that Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS) is demonstrating real gains. He praised specific Foundation contributors (naming @raulvk in his post) for both making PeerDAS “work so smoothly” and for helping set a roadmap targeting faster block and data propagation, improved resilience to network faults and parallel work on network privacy.
Multiple industry outlets summarised and amplified Buterin’s remarks while placing them in the context of the Fusaka upgrade — the larger protocol work that bundles PeerDAS and other scalability and data-handling improvements. Reporters described Buterin’s comments as a notable public acknowledgment that the Foundation’s focus has broadened to explicitly include network-layer engineering and operational robustness.
Why PeerDAS matters
PeerDAS is a data-availability sampling mechanism designed to let nodes check whether block or blob data is available to the network without forcing every node to download every byte. That property is central to long-term scaling strategies for Ethereum and its Layer-2 rollups: it can reduce the burden of storing and relaying very large on-chain blobs while preserving the ability of nodes to detect censorship or missing data. Industry coverage says PeerDAS is one of the core features of the Fusaka upgrade and a leading candidate to ease data-availability bottlenecks for rollups.
Industry reaction and context
Commentators said Buterin’s public praise is significant for two reasons. First, it signals internal alignment inside Ethereum’s core ecosystem: where previously more attention was paid to crypto-economic mechanisms and consensus research, the Foundation — and collaborators inside the community — are now visibly investing in low-level networking work that affects liveness, propagation speed and privacy. Second, emphasizing PeerDAS performance addresses concrete concerns about data bloat and home-node viability as blob-heavy usage rises.
Coverage also noted the practical challenges PeerDAS must still meet: achieving broad, tested deployments across diverse node operators, ensuring sampling security under adversarial conditions, and integrating privacy protections so propagation improvements do not come at the cost of exposing validator identities or topologies. Developers have published roadmaps and performance tests but independent verification and staged rollouts remain key to mainstream adoption.
The people behind the work
Buterin’s message singled out @raulvk — an active developer in Ethereum’s networking and client ecosystem — alongside other Foundation engineers and contributors. Media coverage framed the shout-out as recognition of months (or longer) of engineering, testing and coordination required to take PeerDAS from design to demonstrable runs on testnets or limited mainnet experiments. That kind of operational maturity is what, in Buterin’s view, changes the earlier deficit he had criticised.
What comes next
Buterin and reporters point to a multi-pronged roadmap: (1) faster propagation so blocks and blob content reach nodes more quickly, improving inclusion and finality characteristics; (2) stronger resilience to partial outages or targeted disruption; and (3) parallel improvements in privacy to prevent easy deanonymization of validators or critical validators’ locations. If these goals are met in staged, audited upgrades, analysts say they could materially improve the experience for home nodes and reduce centralization pressure in the long term.
Caveats
Public enthusiasm about PeerDAS’s potential is tempered by standard engineering caveats: lab and testnet performance does not automatically scale to an open, heterogeneous mainnet; cryptographic sampling protocols must be proven secure against deliberate manipulation; and privacy-preserving propagation often requires trade-offs with latency and bandwidth. Developers and independent researchers will be watching for peer-reviewed tests and staged deployments.
Bottom line
Vitalik Buterin’s public acknowledgment that the Ethereum Foundation has strengthened its P2P networking capabilities — and his praise of contributors for getting PeerDAS to a working state — is both a technical endorsement and a morale boost for engineers focused on the network layer. For users and builders, success on the PeerDAS roadmap could meaningfully reduce data-availability friction for Layer-2s and improve decentralised node participation — two long-standing goals for Ethereum’s continued scalability and resilience.
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