Vitalik Buterin Hails a New Milestone in Ethereum’s Scaling Push

Ethereum has just cleared a symbolic and highly technical hurdle in its long campaign to become the settlement layer for the internet. On 4 November 2025, the network recorded a peak throughput of 3,453 transactions per second—far above the levels that for years fed the narrative that Ethereum was powerful but congested. For Vitalik Buterin, cofounder of the protocol, this was not just another performance spike to post on social media, but a concrete demonstration that Ethereum’s roadmap toward higher capacity, powered by rollups and new data-availability techniques, is beginning to show up in real numbers. Coming from a chain that was once mocked for expensive swaps and clogged DeFi weekends, the message was clear: Ethereum is getting faster, and this time it’s measurable. Cointribune

The significance of crossing 3,400+ TPS is not that Ethereum will now run everything on-chain overnight; it is that the architecture the community has spent years building is finally yielding the kind of throughput that can support a rich ecosystem of L2s, consumer apps, and high-frequency use cases. Buterin immediately highlighted the role of layer-2 solutions—Arbitrum, Optimism, Base and their peers—in pushing aggregate capacity upward. These rollups execute transactions off the main chain but settle back to Ethereum, meaning Ethereum acts as the security and data anchor while the actual user activity can scale horizontally. The record therefore reflects not only what the L1 can do at a given moment, but how well the whole modular stack is beginning to coordinate. Cointribune

What gives this milestone extra weight is that it does not arrive in a vacuum. Over the past two years, Ethereum’s core developers and researchers have insisted that the future of the network lies in better data availability and cheaper posting of rollup data, rather than in endlessly increasing the base layer’s block size. The appearance of technologies like PeerDAS—flagged by Buterin himself as “crucial” for the next wave of scaling—fits right into that vision. PeerDAS is designed to make it easier and cheaper for rollups to publish their data to Ethereum without forcing every node to download everything, thereby lifting the ceiling on how much activity can be safely anchored to the chain. If Ethereum can lower the cost and friction of being a well-behaved rollup, it can multiply network usage without sacrificing decentralization. Today’s throughput figure is an early proof that these ideas are not just theoretical any more. Cointribune

This also matters politically inside the ecosystem. Ethereum has long been compared—sometimes unfavorably—to high-throughput chains that boast impressive TPS but make trade-offs on security or decentralization. The Ethereum camp’s response has consistently been: we will scale, but we will do it without giving up the properties that make the chain trustworthy. Showing a real-world spike to 3,453 TPS, with rollups playing a central role, allows Ethereum to say: the modular path works, and it works at nontrivial scale. It reassures builders who have been waiting for lower fees and higher capacity before rolling out consumer-facing products, and it sends a signal to competing ecosystems that Ethereum’s scaling story is advancing on schedule. Cointribune

The milestone also has clear market implications. Higher throughput translates, over time, into more comfortable conditions for DeFi protocols, NFT platforms, on-chain gaming, and even enterprise or government experiments that need predictable transaction capacity. When activity spikes—during an airdrop rush, a bull-market minting wave, or a liquidations storm—users are less likely to be priced out. That resiliency is exactly what critics said Ethereum lacked in previous cycles. If future upgrades deliver what PeerDAS promises, and if rollups continue to mature with better shared sequencers and interoperability, Ethereum could sustain entire waves of usage without the network feeling “full.” For businesses deciding which chain to build on in 2025–2026, that kind of performance narrative carries real weight. Cointribune

It would be premature, however, to declare Ethereum’s scaling challenge completely solved. A single record day does not erase the need for ongoing client optimizations, for better rollup UX, or for fee markets that are friendlier to small transactions. Nor does it eliminate competition: Solana, Aptos, and other high-performance chains continue to push their own tech forward and court developers aggressively. What today’s record does is shift the tone: instead of defending itself from “Ethereum can’t scale” claims, the community can point to concrete network-wide capacity and to a pipeline of improvements that should make such peaks more common. In that sense, Buterin’s reaction was less celebratory than it was confident—this is the shape Ethereum was always supposed to take, and now we are starting to see it on-chain. Cointribune

Sources: Cointribune, public statements and analysis on Ethereum’s 3,453 TPS record, and comments attributed to Vitalik Buterin. Cointribune