Vitalik Buterin, the developer and Co-Founder of Ethereum, noted the significance of the upcoming Fusaka upgrade, as the community is gearing up for this update. Explaining PeerDAS, a core feature within the Fusaka upgrade, he said that it “is trying to do something pretty unprecedented.”
While replying to an X post by Dragonfly’s Head of Data ‘hildobby,’ who pointed out inefficiency in blobs, Buterin replied that Fusaka will fix it. PeerDAS is aiming to give Ethereum blockchain an edge that does not require any single node to download the full data, he emphasized.
The Dencun upgrade in March 2024 added blobs, or binary large objects, to its blockchain. Introduced in EIP-4844, also known as Proto-Danksharding, Blobs are temporary data containers that are included in blocks. They only stored blockchain data for 18 days before being deleted. This is different from regular transaction data, which is permanently stored on Ethereum’s main chain. This arrangement makes it easier for the network to store things for a long time.
“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,” Buterin said. “If more than 50% of chunks are available, then the node theoretically can download those chunks, and use erasure coding to recover the rest.”
However, Buterin noted that the first version still requires full block data in two scenarios. These are the initial broadcasting of a block and reconstruction. The reconstruction will be done if the publisher provides 50-100% of the block. These roles hold significant importance due to their unreliability. Only one honest actor is needed to keep the protocol’s integrity, and different nodes can do these jobs for different blocks.
While it looks complicated, Buterin said that future updates on the network will try to make these functions more evenly distributed, “like cell-level messaging and distributed block building.”
Fusaka is a big step forward for Ethereum’s roadmap. The upgrade will make Layer 2 solutions work better by lowering bandwidth needs and allowing data verification to happen across multiple locations. This will get Ethereum ready for a future with lots of decentralized apps that can handle a lot of traffic. The update is expected to be launched in December of this year.
