Fusaka Upgrade Makes Ethereum More ‘Strategic’

Ethereum’s upcoming Fusaka upgrade on Wednesday is being framed as just another scaling step, but it marks a shift in how the network ships change. Instead of massive, multi‑year overhauls, Fusaka is the first proof that Ethereum can deliver focused, high‑impact upgrades in something closer to six months.

At the center of Fusaka is Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP)‑7594, Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS), the technical headline that changes how Ethereum handles data from rollups without forcing node operators to buy data‑center hardware or compromise on decentralization, in line with the roadmap the Ethereum Foundation laid out for the next 12 months.

“Ethereum is now trying to be more strategic in what it’s delivering and how quickly it’s delivering it,” Chris Berry, head of onchain engineering at Bitwise Onchain Solutions, one of the longest‑running institutional Ether (ETH) staking providers, told Cointelegraph.

Related: How the Fusaka upgrade fits into Ethereum’s long-term roadmap

What Fusaka actually changes

After Dencun introduced blobs and Pectra tightened UX, Fusaka builds on that foundation. PeerDAS changes how nodes deal with rollup data. Rather than every validator downloading entire blobs, they only need to verify smaller pieces, sampled across the network. That cuts duplication and bandwidth, and frees up room for more data overall.

“There’s a lot of duplication that gets sent around the network,” Steve Berryman, head of client partnerships at Bitwise Onchain Solutions, said, adding, “PeerDAS reduces that duplication of data.”

Under the hood, the upgrade also formalizes a new process for adjusting blob capacity. Blobs are data packages used by Ethereum rollups to post large amounts of offchain transaction data to the main chain cheaply and efficiently, enabling high-throughput layer-2 scaling without bloating the entire blockchain.

Before Fusaka, changes to blob limits required a full hard fork. Now, Ethereum gets a “blob‑parameter‑only” schedule, and pre‑planned increases to blob targets can roll out without repeating the whole fork dance each time.

A symbiotic relationship between L1 and L2

Fusaka isn’t only about throwing more bandwidth at the problem. It also tweaks how fees balance between layer 1 and layer 2. Ethereum’s rollup‑centric roadmap depends on a healthy symbiosis: L2s need cheap, reliable data space on L1, but L1 also needs to be compensated fairly for providing it.

“There’s a symbiotic relationship between the L1 and the L2,” Berry said. “You want L2s to pay a fair price so they’re not taking advantage of the L1, but equally you want the L1 to be fairly priced so it’s not taking advantage of the L2. Part of this upgrade is re‑addressing that balance between fees and making sure L2 data is priced more fairly when utilization is low.”

For users, the early signs are simple: cheaper gas and less congestion. “We’ve already seen the pending transaction pool shrinking,” Berryman said, referring to changes that were activated ahead of the fork. “I started in 2015, and I can’t remember seeing gas prices as cheap as they are now on Ethereum.”

Related: Ethereum tripling its gas limit is the ‘floor, we can go higher’ — Sassano

Security and home stakers

Any upgrade that touches data availability raises questions about node requirements and home stakers. Fusaka has been designed to stay within the bounds of what consumer‑grade hardware can handle, with extensive testnet runs to validate that increased blob capacity doesn’t silently push out small operators.

“It’s all about scaling without compromising our core values,” Berryman said. “Home stakers are an important part of the network. We don’t want to go beyond what a home staker can run at home, and Fusaka respects that.”

The real success metric, Berry argued, won’t be a flashy headline number so much as quiet reliability and rising utilization. “First, that the upgrade goes out securely and doesn’t break anything. Then, over the next few months, we actually see the network using the new capacity, more blobs hitting their targets, more gas per block being used. It’s one thing to add capacity; it’s another thing for the ecosystem to grow into it.”