Ethereum's most consequential networking upgrade in years has now operated without major incident for close to twelve months. PeerDAS, the protocol that allows validators to confirm data availability without downloading full blocks, has held up through a sustained rise in blob capacity and a sharp collapse in Layer 2 transaction costs.

What PeerDAS Actually Does

Data availability is the property the rest of the ecosystem relies on: Layer 2 networks publish their transaction data to Ethereum so that anyone can verify and reconstruct their state, and PeerDAS is designed to confirm that this published data is complete and retrievable. Each node needs to check only about one-eighth of the extended data to be confident the complete dataset is present. When enough randomly selected samples come back intact, the network reaches consensus that the data is available, even though no single participant holds all of it.

The underlying machinery relies on erasure coding similar to Reed-Solomon. Extended blob data is divided into 128 columns, which are then distributed across the network via gossip subnets. Each node subscribes to a subset of roughly eight columns, keeping the workload light enough that validators do not need upgraded hardware to participate.

The protocol's formal name is EIP-7594, and it shipped as the headline feature of the Fusaka hard fork on December 3, 2025. Ahead of mainnet activation, the Ethereum development community ran extensive testing across hundreds of nodes on a dedicated devnet.

Blob Capacity Growth and the Fee Collapse

At launch, the target stood at six to nine blobs per block. By December 9, 2025—six days after the Fusaka upgrade—the target had climbed to 10 blobs. Less than a month later, on January 7, 2026, it reached 14 blobs.

The fee impact has been striking. Because those Layer 2 networks pay to publish their transaction data in blobs, the blob target functions as the supply side of their costs. In the weeks before PeerDAS activated, Layer 2 users were paying between $0.20 and $0.50 per transaction. By the first quarter of 2026, those costs had compressed to a range of $0.005 to $0.02—a reduction of more than 95% in a matter of months. At that range, a per-transaction fee works out to a fraction of a cent to two cents—small enough to be a rounding error on most transfers.

The decline is not solely attributable to PeerDAS. Ethereum's prior EIP-4844 upgrade, which introduced blob-carrying transactions in early 2024, had already separated blob fees from execution gas fees. PeerDAS extends that foundation by allowing far more blob data to flow through the network without proportionally increasing the burden on individual validators.

Why Decentralization Is the Core Story

Because no single node is required to download or store the complete blob dataset, the protocol achieves what researchers describe as decentralized data availability consensus. A validator running on modest consumer hardware can participate fully in confirming data availability by sampling only its assigned column subset and relying on peer requests to reconstruct anything missing. That low hardware requirement is the practical link between the protocol's design and its decentralization goals.

Vitalik Buterin has characterized the protocol as a meaningful advance in blockchain scalability. The researchers most closely associated with the work, including Danny Ryan and Dankrad Feist, spent years developing the theoretical groundwork before implementation took shape. Feist's original danksharding proposal outlines the larger architecture of which PeerDAS represents an early phase. Full danksharding would push blob capacity significantly higher still, potentially enabling thousands of blobs per block.

What Comes Next for Ethereum's Scaling Roadmap

The progression from 6 to 14 blobs over roughly five weeks in late 2025 suggests the Ethereum developer community is comfortable moving quickly once a baseline of stability has been established. The end state on that roadmap is full danksharding and its potential of thousands of blobs per block, and the pace of any further blob target increases is the concrete marker of progress toward it.