jakiro
Author: Chloe, ChainCatcher
Ethereum officially completed a major upgrade called “Fusaka” early this morning.This is the second hard fork after the Pectra upgrade in May this year. It symbolizes the determination of the Ethereum development team to accelerate iteration and officially enters the rhythm of twice-yearly upgrades.At the same time, the price of ETH has climbed to a maximum of $3,240 in consecutive days, up approximately 20% from recent lows, reflecting the positive market sentiment.
The Fusaka upgrade (named from the combination of Fulu and Osaka) not only covers comprehensive optimization of the consensus layer and execution layer, but also introduces up to 12 Ethereum improvement proposals, focusing on improving network throughput, optimizing transaction speed, and revising the economic model to strengthen the deflation mechanism of ETH.
The core highlight of this upgrade is undoubtedly the “PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling)” technology. This innovation is regarded as a key step on the expansion path of Ethereum. It is expected to shorten transaction delays from minutes to milliseconds, bringing a more immediate user experience to decentralized applications and payment systems.
Core developers’ live testimonials demonstrate Ethereum’s commitment to improving the speed and performance of the mainnet
The Fusaka upgrade process went smoothly and was finalized in about 15 minutes after being triggered at 21:49 UTC last night.According to Coindesk, several core developers witnessed this moment during the EthStaker live broadcast. Consensys engineer Gabriel Trintinalia said: “Fusaka clearly demonstrates Ethereum’s commitment to improving the speed and performance of the main network. During the early development stages of the Fusaka upgrade, any features that may cause a delay in the fork, such as features that require more research or are too complex, were lowered in priority and removed from the development scope.”
According to the Ethereum Foundation, the team optimistically predicts that this upgrade will lay the foundation for users’ “instant-feel user experiences” and that this technology will unlock up to 8 times the data throughput. For L2 expansion solutions such as Optimism and Arbitrum, it will be equivalent to submitting more data at a lower cost, thus reducing end-user transaction fees, while leaving huge room for growth for the network.
PeerDAS introduces the concept of “sampling”, which will unlock up to 8 times the data throughput
According to previous reports, PeerDAS was originally planned to be included in Ethereum’s major upgrade Pectra in February this year, but it was postponed due to testing needs.
PeerDAS, the full name of Peer Data Availability Sampling, is a data processing mechanism designed to solve the bottleneck of the Ethereum main network when processing L2 submitted data.
Simply put, since the 2024 Dencun upgrade introduced “Blobs” (a temporary data storage space designed for L2), validators must completely download and verify the entire content of each Blob, resulting in heavy network bandwidth burden, limited processing performance, and indirectly driving up transaction fees.
According to Coin Metrics, Blob has seen significant adoption since its launch thanks to rollups such as Base and Arbitrum.But this also results in blob usage often approaching saturation (currently close to the target of 6 blobs per block), potentially triggering an exponential rise in rollup fees.As data availability requirements continue to grow, Blob space has become a key bottleneck in Ethereum’s expansion path.
The innovation of PeerDAS is the introduction of the concept of “sampling”, that is, the verifier does not need to download the entire Blob, but only checks randomly selected “data slices” (small fragments).Through this peer-to-peer network sharing and verification method, the system can ensure that data availability and security are not compromised, while significantly reducing computing and storage requirements.
According to official estimates, in addition to unlocking up to 8x data throughput to allow the L2 network to submit more data at a lower cost, the upgrade is expected to lower the barrier to entry for small or new validator operators by reducing the resources required to run a small number of validators.However, Ethereum developers also point out that large institutions operating large numbers of nodes, such as staking pools, will not see the same savings.While the savings for large institutional validators will be smaller, overall this will make Ethereum more inclusive and attract more participants to the ecosystem.
“These improvements will take several months to fully take effect, as we will only slowly increase the number of blobs to ensure the network can safely handle the increased throughput,” said Ethereum Foundation core developer Marius Van Der Wijden.
Floor pricing mechanism ties blob fees to L2 execution costs
In addition to PeerDAS, the Fusaka upgrade also makes precise adjustments to the economic level, especially to solve the downturn in the Blob fee market.Since the Dencun upgrade, due to oversupply, Blob fees have often dropped to an ineffective level of 1 wei, causing the ETH burn mechanism (Burn Mechanism) to be almost ineffective in this part.According to Blockworks statistics, within a few months after the Pectra upgrade, Blob fees were only about $900, and even the short-term peak in November was only $23,000, which contributed only a limited amount to the deflationary pressure on ETH.
To this end, EIP-7918 introduces a “Reserve Price” mechanism to link Blob fees to L2 execution costs to prevent price collapse and ensure consistency with actual processing costs.This not only stabilizes market fluctuations, but also allows Blob fees to more effectively contribute to ETH destruction as L2 transaction volume grows.In conjunction with EIP-7892’s “Blob Parameter Only Hard Fork” (BPO) function, Ethereum will increase the target number of Blobs per block to 14 (maximum limit of 21) before January 7, 2026, to further expand capacity.
Other EIPs cover protocol cleanup and performance improvements, such as:
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EIP-7935: Increase the default block gas limit to 60 million to allow more calculations and provide flexibility for future adjustments.
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EIP-7951: Added native support for secp256r1 (P-256) signature, allowing the wallet to integrate device biometrics and improve user login convenience.
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EIP-7825 and EIP-7934: Set transaction and block size limits to prevent resource-intensive attacks such as DoS.
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EIP-7883: Increase the gas cost of certain mathematical operations to ensure fair distribution of network resources.
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EIP-7642: Remove old message fields, simplify protocol and clean up program code.
Ethereum Lianchuang Vitalik Buterin posted on the X platform that Ethereum has continued to introduce “hard fixed rules” in recent years to improve protocol security and long-term adaptability.He recalled that in 2021, EIP-2929 and EIP-3529 adjusted storage costs and reduced gas returns; in 2024, Dencun upgraded and weakened the contract destruction instructions; in 2025, a gas limit of 16.777216 million was set for a single transaction.
Vitalik emphasized that such changes set clear processing upper limits to help prevent DoS attacks, simplify clients, and expand efficiency space; more restrictions are expected to be added in the future, including limiting the total bytes of program code that can be accessed (increasing the cost of large contracts in the short term, adopting binary trees and charging by data blocks in the medium term), setting the maximum validator computing cycle and synchronization cost adjustment for zero-knowledge EVM, and optimizing memory billing to clearly define the upper limit of EVM maximum consumption.
The success of Fusaka not only fixed the current pain points, but also established the rhythm of rapid development of Ethereum.Large-scale upgrades that were once a year in the past (such as Shapella in 2023 and Dencun in 2024) have been transformed into semi-annual upgrades, proving that the foundation still retains strong execution capabilities after experiencing personnel changes.
Next year’s major upgrade “Glamsterdam” (Gloas + Amsterdam) is expected to focus on parallel processing technologies such as Block Level Access List (BAL) to further improve performance.
