Compilation: The Fusaka upgrade of Ethereum is the latest step in this decade-long engineering project, which stabilizes Ethereum from a fragile experiment to a global settlement platform. To understand why Fusaka is so important and why the network has almost no choice but to undergo similar upgrades, it is useful to first understand the background of Ethereum.
Author: Mars_DeFi
Compilation: Plain Language Blockchain
The Fusaka upgrade of Ethereum is the latest step in this decade-long engineering project, which stabilizes Ethereum from a fragile experiment to a global settlement platform.
To understand why Fusaka is so important and why the network has almost no choice but to undergo similar upgrades, it is useful to first understand the background of Ethereum.
Phase One: The Birth of Ethereum (2015-2017)
● Frontier (2015)
Ethereum launched in July 2015 with the Frontier version. Its deliverables:
The first reinforced blockchain
Smart contracts go live
Gas-based fee model
Proof of Work consensus
The situation at the time:
No wallets
No DeFi
No NFTs
No tools primitive developer experiments. ETH trading price was between $1–$3. No one knew what Ethereum would become.
● Homestead (2016)
With this upgrade, Ethereum began to get serious. Its deliverables:
Protocol stability
New opcodes
Safer upgrades
Better network connectivity
In the same year:
DAO collapse
Millions of ETH stolen
Ethereum hard fork
Split between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic
The painful lessons learned from this upgrade made security a rule. This ensured that audits became more rigorous, stifling innovation but making Ethereum stronger.
● Byzantium (2017)
This was a cryptographic upgrade that introduced:
zk-SNARKs
Reduced issuance
Security improvements
Difficulty-bomb scheduling
What this meant:
Ethereum gained privacy infrastructure
Contract execution became more secure
ETH supply was tightened
Phase Two: The Era of Scalability Pressure (2018-2020)
During this era, Ethereum's user demand exploded prematurely. This meant blocks were filled, fees rose, and applications crashed. Therefore, Ethereum had no choice but to respond with efficiency upgrades.
● Constantinople and Petersburg (2019)
Improvements:
Cheaper cryptographic operations
Deterministic contract addresses (CREATE2)
Reduced issuance (from 3 ETH per block to 2 ETH)
Gas optimization
Ironically, a security vulnerability triggered the Petersburg upgrade on the same day. This led Ethereum to decide that the best practice is to release slowly forever.
● Istanbul (2019)
Ethereum quietly shifted to Rollup. The upgrade included:
Cheaper calldata
Better zk support
Replay protection
Cross-chain improvements
Hidden achievement: Rollup became feasible, thus Ethereum began preparing for L2.
● Muir Glacier (2020)
Ethereum delayed the entrance bomb again. Why it matters:
Proof-of-Stake is complex
Ethereum refused to rush sales
Preparations for the Merge were ongoing
Phase Three: DeFi, NFTs, and Fee Hell (2021-2022)
Ethereum became the home of DeFi, ERC-20s, NFTs, and DAOs. This was accompanied by high gas fees, transaction failures, and only “whales” could move.
● London Upgrade (2021)
In this upgrade, Ethereum disrupted its economic engine. It introduced:
Fee report (EIP-1559)
Dynamic base fees
Predictable gas pricing
Long-term impacts:
Peak demand period, ETH price deflation
Supply and demand adjustments
Ethereum monetized network congestion
● Paris (2022)
Ethereum did something that had never happened on any major network in history: it real-time replaced the proof of work formula with proof of stake. This was called “The Merge.” It was a bold move that had a huge positive impact on Ethereum.
Energy usage down 99.95%
Issuance down 90%
ETH became scarce capital
Phase Four: The Era of Rollup (2023-2025)
Ethereum stopped executing everything. Ethereum began settling everything.
● Shapella (2023)
This upgrade brought unstaking (unlocking staking). Results:
More staking
Reduced panic selling
Stronger validator growth
Risks:
About 30% of ETH is staked
Nearly 1 million validators
● Dencun (2024)
Dencun introduces Proto-Danksharding through EIP-4844. Ethereum did not immediately implement full sharding, but instead added a special type of transaction proposing “data blobs.”
These are temporary aggregated data, cheaper than calldata, and will be automatically cleared.
Results:
L2 fees down 90%
Explosive growth of Rollup
Ethereum became “cheap” without changing its core
● Pectra (2025)
This is the UX (user experience) era where Ethereum becomes usable. It introduces:
Smart wallet features
Gas abstraction
Validator consolidation
Execution layer-consensus layer unification makes Ethereum more accessible and more attractive to investors.
Upcoming Fusaka Upgrade:
You should know that @VitalikButerin divides Ethereum's architecture into the following phases:
Surge – Scalability
Disaster – MEV defense
Verge – Statelessness
Purge – Historical data cleanup
Waste – UX upgrades
The Fusaka upgrade supports all five aspects of the architecture, hence it is referred to as the “scalability breakthrough.” It is scheduled for December 3, 2025, and is the most important upgrade since the Merge.
If the Merge redefined how Ethereum reaches consensus, then Fusaka redefines how it handles data. It achieves this through four main nodes:
Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS)
Layered expansion of blob capacity
Increased gas limits
Transition to Verkle trees for state representation, supplemented by improved block proposer selection.
• PeerDAS:
In the Dencun model, Rollup publishes its data to Ethereum's data blocks, and full nodes download and store these data blocks during their availability.
As Rollup usage grows, the amount of data per block may gradually increase, raising the bandwidth requirements for validators. Without intervention, this trend will either centralize validation (only well-equipped operators can keep up) or limit Rollup capacity.
Solution: PeerDAS addresses this issue by changing how data availability is verified.
Validators no longer need to download the entire data block from each full node, but instead need to coordinate with peers to check random data fragments.
If enough independent samples succeed, the likelihood of data loss or format errors will be negligible.
Impact:
Bandwidth reduced by 70–80%
Running nodes become cheaper
More decentralization
Rollup security scalability
• Expansion of blob capacity:
When Fusaka itself activates, the data block limits remain unchanged from Dencun (target values and vertices per block), but the roadmap includes subsequent “BPO” hard forks that will gradually raise these limits to ten, then fourteen blobs per block.
With PeerDAS alleviating bandwidth pressure, Ethereum can withstand this growth without compromising the operator network.
• Data block roadmap:
6 to 10 to 14 blobs per block
67%+ data growth
Rollup congestion decreases
Fees plummet further
This creates an exciting economic cycle:
More blobs will lead to more rollups, resulting in more transactions.
More transactions will lead to more thinking, which means less supply.
In simple terms, Ethereum is scaling and deflating.
• Increased Gas Limits:
Along with these changes at the data layer, Fusaka will increase the gas limit from 45 million to 60 million per block.
This does not turn Ethereum into a high-frequency execution engine, but it does provide a roughly one-third increase in execution capacity.
Complex DeFi transactions, NFT minting, and other high gas operations gain more breathing room, reducing transaction failures caused by block congestion.
Here is a trade-off: Higher gas limits will accelerate state growth and increase the computational burden per block, which may put pressure on weaker nodes.
However, this cost is mitigated by the shift to Verkle trees, which make state proofs more compact and enable a new lightweight verification model.
• Verkle Trees and State Efficiency:
Ethereum currently uses Merkle Patricia trees to represent the global state (mapping addresses and storage slots to their values).
While Merkle trees are conceptually simple, the proofs they generate tend to be relatively large, often in the megabyte range.
This complicates the cost fix for light clients verifying state related to a given account, hindering any attempts to create stateless or semi-stateless nodes.
Verkle trees use commitments that allow for compressing a large number of key-value pairs into concise commitments. The resulting proof for a single key is an order of magnitude smaller, around tens of kilobytes instead of megabytes. This client verifies state with minimal bandwidth and storage.
Results:
Proof size reduced by 90%
Light clients become a reality
Mobile verification connections
Stateless nodes emerge
• Deterministic Proposer Lookahead
Fusaka also introduces more predictability for block proposer selection.
By allowing participants to know in advance which validator will propose a given block, the protocol opens the door for “pre-confirmation-based” and more advanced forms of transaction ordering and MEV management.
Rollups that rely on Ethereum's block order (e.g., using “ordering-based” rollups) can coordinate more effectively with L1 validators.
At the same time, a more transparent proposer schedule can help reduce the incentives for certain categories of ordering behavior surrounding transaction sorting.
Summary:
From the overall upgrade history of Ethereum and @VitalikButerin's roadmap, Fusaka is not a one-time optimization, but rather an implementation of design decisions that may have originated years ago.
PeerDAS and blob expansion drive SURGE (scalability) forward by increasing Rollup data throughput.
More predictable proposer selection and Rollup-based infrastructure contribute to SCOURGE (MEV defense), as they form part of the MEV management toolkit.
Verkle trees are at the core of VERGE (statelessness), supporting stateless and light clients.
Gas limits and state efficiency work, along with eventual historical data cleanup, relate to PURGE (cleanup).
The account abstraction and user-facing improvements that began in Pectra remedy SPLURGE (UX upgrades), but they rely on the scalability and state improvements unlocked by Fusaka.
Strategic Impacts:
Technically, Fusaka enables Ethereum to support a larger volume of Rollup traffic without sacrificing decentralization.
Economically, it makes it possible for transaction volume growth to far outpace supply, deepening the connection between network usage and ETH value.
From a governance and ecosystem perspective, it establishes a characteristic pattern in Ethereum's history: thoughtful, research-driven upgrades that trade short-term convenience for long-term soundness.
Competitively, the Fusaka era positions Ethereum as a settlement and data availability layer for a high-throughput Rollup constellation, rather than a catch-all monolithic chain.
Fast, low-fee Layer 1s that compete directly on base layer throughput may still have their niche markets, but Ethereum's bet is: a highly centralized, economically robust, and institutionally stable settlement layer that supports thousands of Rollups, forming a more durable architecture.
It is a moment where Ethereum's first decade of research and incremental upgrades converges into a coherent, high-capacity, institutional-grade settlement L1, poised to support global financial and computational systems for decades to come.
Article link: https://www.hellobtc.com/kp/du/12/6148.html
Source: https://x.com/Mars_DeFi/status/1995359005581971813
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