- Fusaka is the next checkpoint in Ethereum development.
- The upgrade will go live on mainnet in December.
- It contains 12 changes, known as Ethereum Improvement Proposals.
Ethereum’s Fusaka upgrade will be activated on the blockchain mainnet on December 3, according to the Ethereum Foundation.
The goal? To enable Ethereum to handle the large transaction traffic of its layer 2 chains, blockchains with an on-chain economy of $47 billion have been built on Ethereum. These chains inherit the base layer security architecture while providing faster and cheaper transactions.
“Fusaka’s biggest impact comes from improving data availability through PeerDAS, which should make rollups cheaper and more scalable,” said Nick Johnson, founder and lead developer of Ethereum Naming Service, ENS. DL News.
Fusaka is the final checkpoint in Ethereum’s development plan. Developers are trying to scale the $410 billion blockchain so that it can handle 100,000 transactions per second, a huge increase from its current maximum of 30 transactions per second. This follows the Pectra upgrade released by the developers in May.
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PeerDAS is one of 12 blockchain changes included in the Fusaka upgrade package. It targets the data load needed to verify transactions of layer 2 blockchains.
Layer 2 chains aggregate thousands of transactions and submit summaries, called blobs, to the Ethereum base layer. Nodes running on the base layer currently need to download the entire blob data to verify its validity.
This process becomes more costly for nodes as layer 2 transactions skyrocket. This also creates a data traffic jam on the base layer.
PeerDAS solves the problem by reducing the data load for nodes when verifying Layer 2 transactions. Instead of downloading the entire blob, nodes only need to check random samples in the blob data to verify transactions.
Leo Fan, co-founder of Cysic, a zero-knowledge blockchain, describes Fusaka as a “profound infrastructural change” for Ethereum that could increase the chain’s throughput eightfold.
The reduced data load could lead to a significant reduction in bandwidth costs for nodes. Experts like Shiv Shankar, CEO of Boundless, a zero-knowledge scalability protocol, have said this could help improve Ethereum’s efficiency.
“This allows Ethereum to handle more activity, which is good for developers building applications,” Shankar said. DL News.
However, Fusaka does not aim to supercharge only Ethereum layer 2 chains. It also includes improvements that directly impact the base layer.
The 12 EIPs include two upgrades that directly aim to expand the block and data limits of the base layer. EIPs, or Ethereum Improvement Proposals, are plans approved by Ethereum developers that codify changes to the blockchain.
These upgrades enable greater transaction processing capacity and increase the number of blobs that layer 2 chains can submit to the main chain.
Osato Avan-Nomayo is our DeFi correspondent based in Nigeria. He covers DeFi and technology. Do you have any advice? Please contact him at osato@dlnews.com.
