Ethereum prepares a controversial 2026 overhaul that will forcibly strip power from the network’s most dominant players

The post Ethereum prepares a controversial 2026 overhaul that will forcibly strip power from the network’s most dominant players appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Ethereum completed its Fusaka upgrade on Dec. 3, marking one of the network’s most essential steps toward long-term scalability. The upgrade builds on a series of changes since the 2022 Merge and follows the earlier Dencun and Pectra releases, which lowered Layer 2 fees and increased blob capacity. Fusaka goes further by restructuring how Ethereum confirms that data is available, widening the channel through which Layer 2 networks like Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base post their compressed transaction batches. It does this through a new system called PeerDAS, which allows Ethereum to verify large volumes of transaction data without requiring every node to download it. Buterin says Fusaka is ‘incomplete’ However, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin cautioned that Fusaka should not be viewed as a completed version of sharding, the network’s long-term scaling plan. Buterin noted that PeerDAS represents the first working implementation of data sharding. However, he noted that several critical components remain unfinished. According to him, Ethereum can now make more data available, and at lower cost, but the full system envisioned over the past decade still requires work across multiple layers of the protocol. Considering this, Buterin highlighted three gaps in Fusaka’s sharding. First, Ethereum’s base layer still processes transactions sequentially, meaning execution throughput has not increased alongside the new data capacity. Secondly, block builders, specialized actors who assemble transactions into blocks, continue to download full data payloads even though validators no longer need to, which creates a centralization risk as data volumes grow. Lastly, Ethereum still uses a single global mempool, forcing every node to process the same pending transactions and limiting the network’s scalability. His message essentially frames Fusaka as the foundation for the next development cycle. He stated: “The next two years will give us time to refine the PeerDAS mechanism, carefully increase its scale while…