Ethereum activated its Fusaka upgrade on mainnet on Wednesday, marking the network’s second major upgrade this year and introducing changes to data availability and block capacity that developers said would define the next phase of scaling.
The upgrade was activated late this afternoon at block height 18,200,000, following test deployments to the Holesky, Sepolia, and Hoodi test networks in October. The final readiness checks were carried out with the customer teams earlier this week.
Ethereum’s price has sprung to life, after trading between around $3,150 and $3,210 in the hours after Fusaka went live, rising steadily through Wednesday evening and after midnight early Thursday, according to CoinGecko data. It is currently up 4.3% to $3,200.
Volume increased from $28.2 billion to $32 billion at the time of writing, in a period of about six hours. The price action is attributed to “strong accumulation from shark wallets” at 1,000-10,000 ETH, early sources said. analysis from Santiment.
Fusaka introduces PeerDAS, a data availability sampling system that allows each node to store only a fraction of the data posted blob datainstead of every byte. It reduces bandwidth and storage requirements and gives the network room to expand blob throughput by approximately eight times compared to previous limits.
“PeerDAS in Fusaka is important because it literally represents shards,” Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin tweeted on the occasion. “Sharding has been a dream for Ethereum since 2015, and taking data availability since 2017, and now we have it.”
The upgrade also enables configuration changes for Blob-Parameter-Only (BPO), allowing clients to increase blob capacity without a full hard fork, according to Ethereum network data. official route map.
In addition to the changes to base blob fees, the upgrade prevents blob fees from collapsing when gas prices rise, which pays for transaction execution and smart contract logic on Ethereum.
Fusaka is also adding tweaks that make transactions more secure and easier to execute, which developers say could help reduce costs and support decentralization as network activity grows.
Heavyweight update
Fusaka appears to be an “infrastructure-heavy update,” said Shiv Shankar, CEO of decentralized zero-knowledge compute marketplace Boundless, in a statement shared with Declutter.
The changes included are “long-standing requests” and “expand capacity in a meaningful way without disrupting the foundations of the system,” he added.
These improvements would likely “affect the way value flows through Ethereum’s base layer, and the most immediate beneficiary is the Layer 1 block space,” according to a Sygnum Bank. study claims.
“As the network becomes more efficient at handling execution or processing larger amounts of data, the effects will likely lead to a gradual increase in fees and validators’ rewards,” the bank wrote. “These will not be immediately visible, but will slowly accumulate as network activity increases.”
Fusaka would “change the competitive edge among rollups” and help “define the downstream effects of the next cycle,” said Guillame Poncin, chief technology officer at blockchain developer platform Alchemy, in a statement shared with Declutter.
Rollups are layer 2 scaling solutions for Ethereum that perform off-chain transactions but post transaction data to the main network.
The upgrade “represents a structural improvement to Ethereum’s settlement architecture,” said Edwin Mata, co-founder and CEO of tokenization platform Brickken, in a statement shared with Declutter.
“By reducing the data load that rollups and validators have to process, the network becomes more predictable in terms of performance and cost,” Mata explains. “That predictability is what regulated institutions look for when assessing whether a public chain can support issuance and post-trade activities at scale.”
Fusaka “effectively lowers the operational threshold for node participation” in such a way that it could broaden the validator base and reduce concentration risk, Mata added.
“Capital markets depend on resilient networks without a single point of failure, and improved decentralization directly contributes to that need,” he said.