Fusaka, the 17th major upgrade to Ethereum now comes around seven months after the Pectra update broadly transformed the decentralized cryptocurrency and smart contract enabled protocol. The recent deployment of Fusaka brings the now 10+ year-old Ethereum project into a so-called new “era of maturity,” according to an extensive blog post from ConsenSys which also noted that Ethereum core devs are now aiming to roll out hard forks (or backwards incompatible system upgrades) on “an accelerated twice-a-year cadence.”
As mentioned in the blog post from ConsenSys, Fusaka maintains the naming convention of tying the execution layer upgrade “to an earthly city (Osaka this time around) while consensus layer improvements give a nod to a heavenly body (the star Fulu in this case).”
As clarified in the blog post by ConsenSys, Fusaka’s latest enhancements don’t include the user experience innovations or staking modifications seen in Pectra, but focus “on backend boosts to enable some of the biggest gains in network scaling since the Merge in 2022.”
According to the update from ConsenSys, this is considered to be a key milepost on the Ethereum roadmap as it continues to wind through The Surge and beyond.
The Surge phase focuses on scalability via rollups “to allow for vastly more user activity and transactions as well as better data availability to ensure the information needed to verify those transactions is reliably accessible to everyone running the network (node operators).”
The changes included in Fusaka are said to now be “designed and implemented by the global Ethereum developer community, working in public and in active dialogue with researchers, client teams, and validators.”
Each upgrade undergoes community “feedback and meticulous planning before mainnet activation.”
Calvin Leyon, Head of Onchain at Kraken said:
“Fusaka is a major unlock for rollups like Ink. More blob space, lower L2 costs, and smarter data availability through PeerDAS mean builders can ship faster without making UX tradeoffs. Ethereum getting more powerful without getting more complicated is what scaling should feel like. It’s a big win for anyone building real products onchain.”
Nicolai Sondergaard, Nansen Research Analyst, said:
“Fusaka itself does not guarantee value accrual to ETH, but it enables it. The upgrade introduces the base infrastructure for based rollups, where Ethereum validators take over L2 sequencing. If rollups choose this path, several things happen at once: L2 MEV flows to ETH stakers, blob demand increases fee burn, pre confirmation revenue boosts validator rewards, and Ethereum starts capturing a much larger share of the economic activity currently trapped at the L2 level.”
They added:
“The key variable is adoption. Fusaka provides the mechanism, but the value only materializes if L2s align with Ethereum by moving away from proprietary or external sequencers.”
Fusaka’s EIPs have undergone “three testnet runs, completing with the last validation on the Hoodi testnet that began in late October.”
Now mainnet activation is planned (and completed) by Dec 3, 2025.
Some key updates:
- More transactions in every block = faster service and lower fees.
- Easier access for L2s and apps with no expensive hardware upgrade.
- Robust security even as the network scales.
The most significant changes in Fusaka:
- Scaling Rollup Efficiency with EIP-7594: Introducing PeerDAS
EIP-7594, PeerDAS, is critical for scaling Ethereum’s Layer 2 throughput while keeping the hardware and bandwidth requirements for full nodes tenable. PeerDAS addresses the resource-intensive problem of every full node needing to store every blob by implementing Data Availability Sampling (DAS). Blobs are uniformly randomly distributed across nodes in the network.
This change is said to be essential for maintaining “network robustness as blob throughput dramatically increases.”
Fusaka is expected to enable theoretical “scale up to 8x the current blob capacity.”
Paul Harris, Senior Staff Blockchain Protocol Engineer at Consensys:
“PeerDAS will allow many nodes on the network to store less data from blobs, and allow us to increase the data available in blobs at the same time. Prior to PeerDAS all nodes had to store all of the blob data, and this is no longer a requirement.”
- Unlocking Higher Throughput with EIP-7935 & EIP-7825: Gas Limit Changes Fusaka introduces gas limit changes that improve network efficiency and security.
The default block gas limit is set to rise, targeting “60 million gas.”
This is an intentional move “toward consistent scaling.”
Crucially, EIP-7825 introduces a Transaction Gas Limit Cap “of 16.78 million gas.”
This limit is a proactive DoS hardening “measure that ensures no single transaction—even large smart contract deployments or complex DeFi operations can consume an entire block, making the network more resilient.”
Gabriel Trintinalia, Protocol Engineer at Consensys:
“With EIP‑7935, each Ethereum block can now include more transactions. More transactions per block means the network can support more activity at once, faster, cheaper, and more reliably.”
Advancing Web3 UX with EIP-7951: Passkey Support
EIP-7951 delivers a major UX upgrade by introducing “support for the secp256r1 curve, which unlocks device-native signing and passkeys.”
Wallets can tap into hardware security modules (HSMs) and FIDO2/WebAuthn directly.
This shift enables improved “onboarding, easier recovery, and multi-factor flows that resemble modern apps without requiring a seed phrase.”
Gabriel Trintinalia, Protocol Engineer at Consensys:
“By supporting hardware-backed signing, EIP‑7951 helps developers enhance security and user experience without the complexity or expense of verifying signatures on-chain.”
Also included in Fusaka:
EIP-7939:
Count Leading Zeros (CLZ) Opcod
Makes certain math operations faster and cheaper for developers.
This EIP adds a new instruction “to the Ethereum Virtual Machine that returns the number of zeros at the start of a 256-bit number.”
It allows for more efficient arithmetic and “bytecode reductions while saving gas in smart contracts.”
EIP-7918:
Blob Base-Fee Bounded by Execution Costs
Helps keep transaction fees fair and “adaptive to network congestion.”
This EIP ensures Layer 2s pay a proportional fee “whenever their activity spikes compute demand on nodes. It links the blob base-fee (charged for storing large data objects) to execution gas, preventing fee market anomalies.”
EIP-7934:
RLP Execution Block Size Limit
Reduces the risk of network delays and “attacks from oversized blocks.”
Sets a maximum block size of 10 MiB for execution payloads, “helping keep propagation and validation times predictable.”
This change lessens the chance for “chain reorganizations or denial-of-service scenarios.”
EIP-7910:
eth_config JSON-RPC Method
Makes it easier for monitoring tools and validators “to check network settings.”
Standardizes a JSON-RPC method allowing “external tools to query a node’s configuration, ensuring validators are correctly synchronized at major forks and upgrades.”
EIP-7883:
MODEXP Gas Cost Increase
Prevents a single transaction from clogging the network “by better pricing a specific complex calculation.”
It raises the gas cost for the MODEXP (modular exponentiation) precompile so its usage more “accurately reflects the actual computational resources needed.”
This change protects the network “from transactions that monopolize block processing time.”
EIP-7892:
Blob-Parameter-Only Forks (BPOs)
Allows Ethereum to safely and gradually “increase network data capacity between big upgrades.”
BPOs introduce a process for adjusting “the number of blobs (large data containers) independently from major network forks.”
This makes future scaling smoother and “more adaptive as demand grows.”
EIP-7917:
Deterministic Proposer Lookahead
Helps the network know who is “proposing blocks ahead of time.”
The Beacon Chain now “sees” upcoming block proposers “further in advance, enabling features like pre-confirmations and improving overall network coordination.”