Ethereum has reached a new milestone. The long-awaited Fusaka upgrade is now live, fundamentally changing how the network handles data, speed, and costs behind the scenes. The price reacted instantly, rising by over 4 percent in a single day.
What Changes with Ethereum’s Fusaka Upgrade? #
While most of the improvements are under the hood, their impact is significant. Layer-2 networks—additional networks built on top of Ethereum that help process transactions faster and cheaper—will soon be able to handle much more data.
This will make transactions cheaper and reduce the need for heavy-duty systems to secure the network.
The core of Fusaka is a new system called PeerDAS. Currently, layer-2 networks like Optimism and Arbitrum send their transactions to Ethereum in large data packets, also known as “blobs.” Until now, the computers that secure the Ethereum network, called validators, had to download and verify all of this data, which consumed significant time and bandwidth. With PeerDAS, each validator only needs to check a small piece of such a data packet.
This is a major win for rollups, systems that bundle many transactions into blobs before sending them to Ethereum. Thanks to this new approach, they can publish this data more cheaply and get more room to grow.
This could also be positive for users. Cheaper rollups mean cheaper transactions, while Ethereum’s security remains intact. Developers expect the capacity to be gradually scaled up, eventually allowing blobs to contain up to eight times more data than before.
Ethereum Steals the Show as Price Surges 4.5% #
Fusaka isn’t just about scaling. The upgrade also brings Ethereum closer to a faster, smoother user experience. Thanks to a new technique called “pre-confirmations,” transactions can soon receive an initial confirmation within milliseconds, whereas it currently often takes minutes.
This makes the network much more suitable for applications that require speed, such as games, trading apps, and wallets.
Additionally, Fusaka includes a series of smaller Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) primarily aimed at making the network safer and more efficient. For example, extremely large transactions are limited, certain computational tasks are made more expensive to prevent abuse, and the network gets more predictable fees for blob data.
Ethereum now also natively supports a widely used digital signature, making it easier to connect hardware wallets and passkeys.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is very pleased with the update. According to Buterin, PeerDAS is “literally the first form of sharding that Ethereum has been working towards since 2015.” Sharding is a technique where a network is split into smaller pieces that distribute work, making the whole system faster and cheaper.
The price of ethereum also reacted immediately to the launch: in the past 24 hours, ETH has risen by 4.5 percent, briefly peaking above $3,200. At the time of writing, the price is $3,183.