Ethereum Completes Historic Fusaka Upgrade: Ushering in a New Era of High Performance and Low Costs

On December 3, 2025, the Ethereum network successfully activated a critical hard fork upgrade called Fusaka at block height 13,164,544. This upgrade is not only another major milestone following the Pectra upgrade in May this year, but is also widely regarded as a decisive step to elevate Ethereum’s data processing capabilities and user experience to new heights.

Through a series of carefully designed protocol improvements, Fusaka is transforming the world’s largest smart contract platform into a more efficient, cost-effective, and inclusive decentralized settlement layer.

Core Breakthrough: PeerDAS Technology Achieves a Quantum Leap in Data Capacity

The core innovation of this upgrade is the introduction of PeerDAS (Peer-to-Peer Data Availability Sampling) technology. Prior to Fusaka, although the Dencun upgrade introduced “Blobs” to provide cheap data storage for Layer-2 networks, each full node still needed to download the entire Blob data, which remained a major bottleneck for network throughput.

PeerDAS completely changes this paradigm. The technology splits complete Blob data into multiple fragments, which are then randomly sampled and verified by validator nodes in the network, without requiring any single node to download all the data. This ingenious cryptographic design reduces the data validation load on individual nodes by about 65%, while still ensuring data integrity and availability.

This significant reduction in load paves the way for safely increasing the network’s overall data capacity. According to the upgrade roadmap, once PeerDAS is running stably, Ethereum will gradually increase the target number of Blobs per block from 6 to 14 through two subsequent lightweight BPO (Blob Parameter Only) forks. This means the data bandwidth available to Layer-2 networks will increase by about 2.3 times in the short term, laying a solid foundation for handling massive transactions and significantly reducing user fees.

Multi-Dimensional Optimization: Comprehensive Enhancements from Mainnet Performance to User Experience

Fusaka’s ambitions go far beyond scaling the data layer; it is a comprehensive reinforcement of Ethereum’s core performance.

• Improved Layer-1 Processing Power: The upgrade increases the mainnet block Gas limit to approximately 60 million, boosting the mainnet’s transaction processing capability (TPS) from the previous 15-20 range to 40-60. At the same time, the EIP-7825 proposal sets a cap of 16.78 million Gas per transaction, preventing malicious oversized transactions from congesting blocks and paving the way for future parallel execution.
• Introduction of a Minimum Blob Fee to Stabilize Market Expectations: To prevent data market mispricing, EIP-7918 introduces a minimum base fee for Blobs that is dynamically linked to Layer-1 Gas fees. This ensures the economic value of Blob space and provides Layer-2 networks with a more stable and predictable operating cost environment.
• Lowered Node Barriers, Strengthening Decentralization: The upgrade includes a “history data expiry” feature, allowing nodes to prune about 530 GB of old chain history data without compromising security. Combined with the reduced bandwidth demand from PeerDAS, the hardware and storage costs of running a full node are significantly lowered, enabling more individual participants to join the network and fundamentally strengthening Ethereum’s decentralization.
• Revolutionizing User Experience and Security: EIP-7951 adds native support for the secp256r1 elliptic curve, a standard widely used in Apple Secure Enclave, Android Keystore, and more. This means users will soon be able to manage wallets directly using their phones’ biometrics (such as Face ID) or hardware security keys, greatly lowering the entry barrier and security risks for Web3.

Ecosystem Impact: A Golden Era for Layer-2, with Direct User Benefits

The impact of the Fusaka upgrade will ripple across the entire Ethereum ecosystem, with Layer-2 networks and their users being the most direct and significant beneficiaries.

1. Substantial Reduction in Layer-2 Transaction Costs: Increased Blob capacity directly eases resource contention on the data layer. At the same time, PeerDAS itself reduces the cost of data validation. Industry analysis expects this will drive Layer-2 data costs down by 40% to 90%. Users will notice real savings when paying fees for on-chain interactions.
2. Ever-Increasing Throughput Limits: Higher data bandwidth means Layer-2 networks like Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base can process much larger transaction volumes. In fact, on the eve of Fusaka’s activation, the Ethereum ecosystem (mainnet plus Layer-2) hit a record peak TPS of 32,950. After the upgrade, this number is expected to be surpassed again, supporting more complex decentralized applications and larger-scale user adoption.
3. A More Robust and Sustainable Network Economy: The minimum Blob fee mechanism ensures data resources are not consumed for free, and when demand is high, these fees become a new source of ETH burning. This injects fresh momentum into Ethereum’s long-term economic security, tying network value more closely to real usage demand.

Looking Ahead: Fusaka Is Not the End, but the Beginning of a New Scaling Paradigm

The successful deployment of Fusaka marks the beginning of a new era—Ethereum’s scaling will no longer depend on “once-every-few-years” large hard forks, but will move into a new phase of “stepless acceleration” and flexible scaling via lightweight forks like BPO. The development team can now adjust network parameters more nimbly and securely in response to real-time Layer-2 demand.

This upgrade clearly proves the correctness of Ethereum’s rollup-centric modular roadmap. By outsourcing execution to Layer-2 and focusing the base layer on security, data availability, and decentralization, Ethereum is solving the “blockchain trilemma” in a unique and efficient way.

For every Ethereum participant—developer, node operator, or ordinary user—Fusaka brings tangible improvements. It’s not just a code update, but another solid step toward Ethereum’s vision as a global open settlement layer. As network performance bottlenecks are systematically overcome, a faster, cheaper, and more user-friendly decentralized future is becoming a reality.