- Ethereum underwent its second major upgrade of the year on Wednesday.
- The upgrade, Fusaka, further reduces the cost of transactions on layer 2 blockchains.
- A minor update will follow on December 9.
Ethereum underwent its second major upgrade of the year on Wednesday, further reducing the cost of transactions on affiliated Layer 2 blockchains while improving user experience and hardening the network against a common exploit.
The upgrade, named Fusaka, also paves the way for future upgrades that could increase the throughput of Ethereum itself.
Since the merger, the momentous network upgrade in 2022, improvements have occurred every year. But a crisis of confidence earlier this year led to renewed urgency among Ethereum developers, and Fusaka’s release comes just seven months after the previous update, Pectra.
Although highly decentralized, Ethereum has long faced a major obstacle to mass adoption: it is cluttered, causing transaction fees to skyrocket. Layer 2 blockchains emerged as a workaround, processing transactions at a lower cost while using Ethereum as a settlement layer.
The main feature of Fusaka is a substantial increase in the amount of data that layer 2 blockchains can send to Ethereum.
“It’s this new technique that people have been working on for a really long time,” Alex Stokes of the Ethereum Foundation said during a livestream hosted by EthStaker on Wednesday. “This allows us to scale without compromising the values that are so important to Ethereum.”
Layer 2s send data packets called blobs to Ethereum for settlement. Fusaka introduces a concept known as Peer Data Availability Sampling, or PeerDAS, which allows individual nodes to store a fraction of blob data without compromising their ability to verify the entirety of that data.
Layer 2 blockchains can currently send a maximum of 9 blobs per block. After Wednesday’s upgrade, Ethereum’s blob capacity will increase eightfold, although the increases will be implemented slowly in a series of smaller upgrades enabled by Fusaka.
“We could say here, in just a few minutes, increase this button 8x,” Stokes said. “Given that this is a very new technique and we don’t know how the network will react, this is not the wisest decision.”
The first mini-upgrade is scheduled for December 9 and will increase the maximum blob capacity to 15. A second upgrade scheduled for January 7 will increase the maximum capacity to 21 blobs per block.
According to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, PeerDAS could eventually make transactions cheaper on Ethereum itself.
“We view blobs as being for L2s,” he said during the livestream Wednesday. “In the long term, we also want to transfer L1 data into blobs. »
Other improvements to Fusaka will allow users to sign transactions using biometrics – leveraging facial recognition technology in smartphones, for example – and will harden Ethereum against denial-of-service attackers, who attempt to render the network useless by cluttering it with a flood of spammy transactions.
“There is, like PeerDAS here, a stack of strategic upgrades that frankly won’t be visible tomorrow,” Paul Brody of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance said during the livestream.
“In fact, we already have more network transaction capacity than we actually need. But we’re laying the foundation for a trillion transactions per day, and we’ll need every (upgrade) by the time we’re done.”
Ethereum’s next major upgrade, Glamsterdam, will be implemented sometime in 2026 and will include improvements that are expected to reduce the cost of using the Ethereum mainnet.
Aleks Gilbert is DL News‘ DeFi correspondent based in New York. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.
