Ethereum has launched its much-anticipated “Fusaka” upgrade on Wednesday, marking the blockchain’s second significant code update of 2025.
This update aims to enhance Ethereum’s capability to manage the growing volume of transaction batches from the layer-2 networks operating above it.
The Fusaka upgrade, sometimes referred to as a “hard fork,” was initiated at 21:49 UTC and is expected to wrap up in about 15 minutes. Afterward, developers will determine whether the changes were successfully implemented. Many core developers gathered to celebrate the milestone on the EthStaker livestream.
Fusaka – a combination of the names Fulu and Osaka – integrates two concurrent hard forks on Ethereum: one on the consensus layer and another on the execution layer. The consensus layer handles transaction verification and smart contracts, while the execution layer ensures these transactions are confirmed and secured.
Central to the upgrade is PeerDAS, a system that allows validators to verify smaller data segments rather than entire “blobs,” thereby reducing costs and computational demands for validators and layer-2 networks.
Currently, layer 2s send their transaction data to Ethereum as blobs, necessitating validators to download and verify the entire content. This contributes to network congestion and slower processing times. PeerDAS alters this by enabling validators to verify only a small fraction of the blob’s data, accelerating the verification process and consequently lowering gas fees associated with these transactions.
In addition to benefits for layer 2s, the upgrade is expected to make it easier for smaller or newer validation operators by reducing the resources required to operate just a few validators. However, Ethereum developers indicate that institutions running large node fleets, such as staking pools, may not experience the same savings.
“The improvements will take several months to fully manifest, as we will gradually increase the blobs to ensure the network can handle the increased throughput safely,” stated Marius Van Der Wijden, a core developer at the Ethereum Foundation, in a message to CoinDesk via Telegram.
Ethereum developers rushed to implement the upgrade this year as the ecosystem confronts a reputation for slow or delayed deployments. The objective was to roll out smaller enhancements now while gearing up for more ambitious upgrades in the future.
“The significance of PeerDAS was such that during the early development of the Fusaka upgrade, any feature that posed a risk of delaying the fork, like those needing additional research or having high complexity, was deprioritized and excluded from the scope,” remarked Gabriel Trintinalia, an Ethereum core developer and engineer at Consensys. “The Fusaka upgrade clearly demonstrates that Ethereum is committed to enhancing Mainnet speed.”
Traditional financial (TradFi) institutions are also taking notice. Last month, Fidelity Digital Assets released a report identifying Fusaka as a critical step toward establishing a more strategically aligned and economically coherent roadmap for Ethereum.
What else is included in Fusaka?
While the primary focus of Fusaka is PeerDAS, there are 12 additional Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) within the upgrade package, primarily aimed at enhancing the developer experience and the overall network health. These include:
- EIP-7642: Eliminates outdated fields from Ethereum’s networking messages to streamline and clean up the protocol.
- EIP-7823: Introduces a maximum limit on the size of certain mathematical operations to prevent network overload.
- EIP-7825: Establishes an upper limit on the size of individual transactions to avoid excessively large, resource-intensive submissions.
- EIP-7883: Increases the gas cost for specific mathematical operations to ensure heavy calculations do not unduly burden the network.
- EIP-7892: Enables future upgrades to adjust only blob-related settings without impacting the overall protocol, ensuring blob adjustments are safer and easier.
- EIP-7910: Introduces a new API method that allows software to easily check the configuration or rules a node is operating under.
- EIP-7917: Enhances transparency and reliability in predicting the proposal of the next blocks.
- EIP-7918: Ensures blob data fees align with the actual processing costs, avoiding drastic price fluctuations.
- EIP-7934: Imposes strict size limitations on certain block data to prevent excessively large blocks from hindering the chain’s performance.
- EIP-7935: Raises the default block gas limit to 60 million, allowing for more computations in each block.
- EIP-7939: Introduces a straightforward new instruction for smart contracts to improve efficiency in certain calculations.
- EIP-7951: Adds support for a commonly used cryptographic signature type.
Looking ahead, developers are already planning the network’s next major upgrade, Glamsterdam, but the specifics regarding its timing and content have yet to be determined.
Read more: Ethereum’s Fusaka Upgrade Could Cut Node Costs, Ease Adoption
