Ethereum Fusaka Upgrade Live – Why It’s a Major Turning Point for Validators, L2s
Ethereum successfully activated its long-awaited Fusaka upgrade on Wednesday, marking the network’s second major code change of 2025 and a significant step toward improving how the blockchain handles the rising volume of data coming from layer-2 scaling solutions.
The hard fork, triggered at 21:49 UTC, finalized roughly 15 minutes later — a smooth landing confirmed live by Ethereum’s core developers and community members gathered on the EthStaker livestream.
The Fusaka upgrade combines upgrades to both the execution layer, where smart contracts and transactions run, and the consensus layer, where those transactions are verified, finalized, and secured.
The name itself blends Fulu and Osaka, reflecting the twin nature of the fork. Together, the changes aim to make Ethereum more efficient as demand for block space surges from rollups that bundle thousands of transactions into a single batch.
At the center of the upgrade is PeerDAS, a new data-availability system poised to reshape how validators process the increasingly large “blobs” of data submitted by layer-2 networks.
Today, validators must download and verify these blobs in full — a process that adds significant computational strain, contributes to congestion, and inflates network costs.
PeerDAS introduces a different model: validators now check only small, randomly selected slices of the blob rather than the entire payload. If the sampled slices verify correctly, the validator can confidently confirm the whole data batch. This approach sharply reduces the bandwidth and CPU resources needed to process layer-2 submissions, potentially lowering gas fees and speeding up settlement across the network.
Developers say the benefits will build gradually.
The reduced computational burden is expected to lower the barrier to entry for smaller or newer validator operators — a meaningful shift in a landscape often dominated by large institutional staking providers. However, developers caution that large node fleets may not see the same proportional savings due to their existing infrastructure scale.
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Ethereum’s rapid delivery of the Fusaka upgrade also signals a shift in tempo. After years of criticism around complex or delayed upgrades, developers made a deliberate push to ship a focused package this year while laying the groundwork for more ambitious changes ahead.
“PeerDAS’ importance was such that, during the initial development of the Fusaka upgrade, any feature that carried a risk of delaying the fork… was deprioritized and removed,” said Gabriel Trintinalia, an Ethereum core developer and engineer at Consensys. “The Fusaka upgrade really shows that Ethereum is serious about making Mainnet faster.”
Traditional financial institutions are paying close attention as well. Fidelity Digital Assets described Fusaka in a recent report as a “decisive step” in creating a more strategically aligned and economically coherent long-term roadmap for Ethereum — a notable signal of growing institutional focus on the network’s scalability and efficiency trajectory.
A Dozen Additional EIPs Land in Fusaka Upgrade
While PeerDAS headlines the upgrade, Fusaka also includes 12 Ethereum Improvement Proposals aimed at network hygiene, security, and developer experience.
Highlights include limits on oversized transactions (EIP-7825), removal of obsolete fields in networking messages (EIP-7642), new caps on heavy math operations (EIP-7823), increased block gas limits (EIP-7935), stricter boundaries on block data sizes (EIP-7934), more transparent block proposer predictions (EIP-7917), better alignment of blob-data fees with actual costs (EIP-7918), and built-in support for a widely used cryptographic signature type (EIP-7951).
Other proposals, such as EIP-7892, create cleaner pathways for future upgrades focused on blob-related settings — a hint at Ethereum’s ongoing shift toward data-centric scaling.
Glamsterdam Next
Even as Fusaka rolls out, developers have already begun scoping the network’s next major upgrade, known as Glamsterdam. Its timeline and contents remain under discussion, though early indications suggest it may target broader performance, storage, and MEV-related improvements.
For now, Fusaka represents the first major milestone in Ethereum’s 2025 roadmap — one centered on accelerating throughput, reducing costs, and positioning the network to better support the explosive growth of rollups.
As layer-2 ecosystems expand and institutional engagement deepens, the success of PeerDAS and its surrounding enhancements will play a critical role in shaping Ethereum’s competitive edge in the years ahead.
