Vitalik Buterin has framed Ethereum scaling around safer throughput gains. In a January 2026 post on X, he said increasing bandwidth is safer than reducing latency and pointed to PeerDAS and zero-knowledge proofs as core tools for scale.
He has also tied scaling to decentralization incentives. Buterin has warned that node economics can pull operators toward crowded locations over time, which can weaken decentralization if builders ignore the pressure.
Furthermore, staking data has moved higher at the same time. Market dashboards and summaries show staked ETH near 36 million, which sits close to 30% of the circulating supply and implies a staked value above $118 billion at recent prices.
Validator queue data has also signaled fresh demand for staking. Several trackers show an entry queue above 2.3 million ETH and a low exit queue, which indicates more validators seek activation than exit.
According to CoinMarketCap data, Ether currently trades near $3,305 and is down about 1.4% over the past 24 hours.