Ethereum is regaining momentum, not in the price charts where it is currently struggling, but in the silent machinery beneath.
Two parallel advances, one on the protocol layer and the other on cryptography, are redefining the speed and lightness of operation of the most used blockchain in the world.
Together, they sketch a future in which anyone, from institutions to small validators, can participate in the network in real time without the need for supercomputers or deep pockets.
Fusaka Upgrade
The first important step on this path is Fusaka, the next hard fork of Ethereum, tentatively expected in December.
The planned upgrade combines improvements to Ethereum’s execution and consensus layers into a single, coordinated release.
Unlike Dencun, which introduced “blobs” to facilitate the evolution of accumulations, Fusaka does not look for raw flow.
Instead, its role is more subtle, aiming to make the network lighter, cheaper and more efficient.
Fusaka is implementing 12 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) aimed at streamlining validator workloads and improving how rollups publish their data.
The centerpiece, EIP-7594, or PeerDAS, allows validators to confirm data availability by sampling portions of the cumulative data instead of downloading it entirely.
While this does not directly increase TPS, it does change how efficiently Ethereum handles data. More rollup information can now fit per block without increasing node requirements.
Developers expect the upgrade to reduce rollup transaction costs and make it easier for small operators to run validators.
Notably, this also increases the gas limit from 45 million to 60 million, a 33% increase that gives Layer 2s more room to publish compressed transaction data.
In the meantime, the deployment is already underway. Fusaka has successfully completed initial testing on Holesky and Sepolia and will undergo its final trial on the Hoodi testnet later this month.
Real-time proof
While Fusaka prepares the ground, the real show takes place in the trial arena.
On October 15, Ethereum scaling company Brevis unveiled Pico Prism, a new zero-knowledge Ethereum virtual machine (zkEVM) capable of producing cryptographic proofs almost as quickly as the network creates blocks.
In testing, the system achieved 99.9% real-time proofs, generating complete block proofs in less than 12 seconds.
Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, pointed out that this represents a quantum leap from performance in May, when the SP1 Hypercube setup could only prove 94% of blocks in the same window.
According to him, the improvement reduces the average proof latency to 6.9 seconds, meaning that block verification can keep pace with block production. Notably, this is a prerequisite for Ethereum’s long-term goal of sub-second settlement.
Drake added that this development, alongside the impending Fusaka upgrade, will make the on-premises system viable for the first time.
He said:
“By the end of the year, multiple teams will test each EVM L1 block on a cluster of 16 GPUs, consuming less than 10 kW in total. The 10 kW target, about the same as a Tesla home charger, is important for on-site verification in garages and offices, eliminating the need for verification in the cloud.”
Roadmap to Scalability
Drake believes that these developments fit into his long-term projection of “L1 gigagas, L2 teragas”.
In this scenario, Ethereum’s throughput on its base layer for high-value activities such as payments and trading amounts to 10,000 transactions per second (TPS).
On the other hand, the network can scale up to 10 million TPS on its Layer 2 networks to handle everything else. Drake said:
“L1 throughput has increased 100-fold since its inception ten years ago, going from 20 kilogas/s to 2 megagas/s. With zkEVM, we can increase it 100-fold again, in half the time.”
Technical debt on the rise
Ethereum’s march toward faster and cheaper transactions comes with a more discreet problem of accumulating its technical debt.
Ethereum developer Federico Carrone, better known as Fede’s Intern, warns that many of the network’s core development tools, particularly the Solidity programming language, are losing momentum.
Robustness is the foundation of Ethereum’s DeFi ecosystem. According to DeFiLlama, it is responsible for over 86% of the smart contract language used in the blockchain network’s $200 billion-plus DeFi protocols.
His concerns echo those of Paradigm CTO Georgios Konstantopoulos, who previously said that Solidity’s ecosystem was “in a problematic state.”
However, Carrone considers the problem to be technical and economic for the blockchain network.
He argued that maintaining complex infrastructure depends on time, continuity and deep expertise, which cannot be achieved overnight.
Additionally, Carrone noted that the planned increase in Ethereum’s gas limit as part of the Fusaka upgrade presents another risk.
Carrone warned that many execution clients have not significantly improved their performance and may struggle to process larger blocks.
Considering all these questions, he concluded:
“Ethereum’s technical debt continues to grow, not only because of the constant and necessary evolution of the protocol, but also because a large number of dependencies and repositories are stagnating. The ecosystem continues to grow, securing billions of dollars in assets, while parts of the foundation erode.”
