On Friday, July 26, Péter Szilágyi questioned the direction that the Ethereum Foundation would be taking and what the future of the smart contract network would be like. Through his X account, the developer expressed his fears that the project will increase centralization with the PeerDAS update . 

The implementation aims to increase the size of Ethereum blobs to 32 MB, which Szilágyi says would disadvantage home stakers with less computing power.  

“Ethereum research is killing home stakers in front of everyone. This is not something I signed up for when I joined Ethereum. At this point, I would love to prove otherwise, but I feel like Ethereum is losing its way. The team has fully embraced the idea of ​​centralizing everything as long as it can be verified. Which is a nice farce: decentralized validation, but centralized control.” 

Péter Szilágyi, developer of Ethereum  

Ethereum blobs were activated in March of this year with the Dencun upgrade. Its purpose is to reduce the cost of Ethereum layer 2 transactions.  

Blobs are a type of temporary storage that increases the rate of data included in Ethereum's archival blocks , and increases the network's versatility for processing and recording ERC-20 tokens and NFTs. The current size of a blob is 128kb, and there is an initial target of 3 blobs per Ethereum block, with a maximum of 6 blobs per block. 

For Szilágyi, “Ethereum is being taken live, and the Ethereum research team is either completely oblivious to it (which seems unlikely to me), or they are playing their own game (which seems more likely to me with past advisory revelations).”  

Vitalik dismissed arguments of centralization

After Szilágyi revealed his views on the direction Ethereum could take, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the network, countered his arguments and stressed that Ethereum researchers are committed to decentralization.  

“I just came out of the Ethereum Foundation research workshops, which took place over the past week, and I can confirm that this is false, we had all kinds of discussions about how to minimize centralization,” Buterin said on his X account.  

He previously admitted part of Szilágyi's argument when he said that "the research team fully accepted the idea of ​​centralizing everything, as long as it can be verified."  

The clash of opinions among Ethereum development leaders comes at a historic time. Trading of Ethereum exchange-traded funds (ETFs) began on U.S. stock markets this week, marking a new era of institutional adoption of the ether cryptocurrency.