The Ethereum network has taken a crucial step toward its next major evolution. The Fusaka upgrade and Ethereum’s scalability continue on schedule after successfully completing testing on the Holesky testnet on October 1. According to the Ethereum Foundation’s roadmap, the mainnet activation is scheduled for December 3, 2025, marking a milestone for validators and Layer-2 solutions.
What innovations does PeerDAS bring to the network?
Fusaka is designed to radically optimize data availability for Layer-2 rollups. The most significant change is the implementation of EIP-7594, known as PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling). This technology allows nodes to verify that data is available by sampling fragments instead of downloading and storing all content. This breakthrough, according to developers, boosts effective throughput by a factor of eight.
Additionally, the upgrade introduces other key EIPs like EIP-7702 for account abstraction and EIP-7251, which increases the maximum effective balance for validators, strengthening the Blockchain‘s security. The post-launch timeline includes two additional phases to increase blob capacity on December 17, 2025, and January 7, 2026.
Fusaka’s main goal is to improve efficiency without compromising decentralization. By implementing PeerDAS, it reduces the burden on nodes, allowing more participants to verify the network with less demanding hardware requirements. This approach addresses one of the biggest bottlenecks for scalability. To ensure a secure transition, the Ethereum Foundation has launched an audit competition on the Sherlock platform. The initiative offers a $2 million prize pool to incentivize researchers to find potential vulnerabilities before the upgrade hits the mainnet, reinforcing trust in the ecosystem.
Fusaka: Opportunities and Challenges for the Ecosystem
The implications of this upgrade are profound and varied. For Layer-2 solutions, Fusaka promises a substantial reduction in operational costs, as blobs (temporary data packets) will become more efficient and cheaper. This could translate into lower transaction fees for end-users, accelerating the migration of activity from the mainnet to rollups. For validators and institutional custodians, it reduces operational and validation costs, although it introduces new technical coordination requirements during deployment.
However, the implementation of Fusaka is not without risks. The significant increase in data capacity and the block gas limit expands the potential attack vectors, such as denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. The complexity of the migration also presents an operational challenge for critical infrastructure built on Ethereum. Therefore, product and compliance teams must closely monitor the transition to mitigate technical and regulatory risks, ensuring the network’s stability is not compromised.
The path to final implementation is clearly defined. With the Holesky test passed, the upcoming phases on the Sepolia and Hoodi testnets will be decisive. Ultimately, the next operational milestone will be the mainnet activation on December 3. The long-term success of Fusaka will depend on the performance of PeerDAS in a massive production environment and the ability of ecosystem operators to adapt to this new architecture without affecting the security and decentralization that characterize Ethereum.
