TL;DR
- The Fusaka hard fork arrives just seven months after Pectra, marking the network’s second major improvement this year.
- The new PeerDAS technology allows nodes to verify data more efficiently, multiplying data capacity by eight.
- The upgrade lays the foundation for future implementations, such as biometric transaction signing and greater security against DoS attacks.
Ethereum has successfully completed its second major upgrade of the year, a hard fork known as the Ethereum Fusaka Upgrade. This action was generated seven months after the Pectra improvement and responds to the urgency of developers to scale the network, reduce transaction costs on affiliated Layer 2 (L2) networks, and shield the ecosystem against potential attacks.
Both congestion and high fees were a key obstacle to the mass adoption of the leading blockchain for years. L2s emerged as a solution, processing transactions economically and using Ethereum only for data settlement.
The substantial increase in the amount of data that these L2s can send to the main network is the most notable feature of the Ethereum Fusaka Upgrade, a crucial step toward greater efficiency.
PeerDAS: The Innovation that Multiplies Data Capacity
The engine of this scalability is the introduction of Peer Data Availability Sampling, or PeerDAS. This new technique allows individual nodes to store only a fraction of the blob data (the data packets that L2s send for settlement) while maintaining the ability to verify that all the information is available and valid.
Alex Stokes, a member of the Ethereum Foundation, assured that this technique has been a long-term goal. “It lets us scale while not compromising on the values that are so important to Ethereum,” he added on a livestream organized by EthStaker.
The Ethereum Fusaka Upgrade has the potential to multiply the capacity of blobs per block by eight, up from the current maximum of 9. However, this increase will be implemented gradually and cautiously, with mini-upgrades scheduled to increase the maximum capacity to 15 blobs in December and 21 in January.
Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, sees even greater potential in PeerDAS, suggesting that it could make transactions on Ethereum’s own Layer 1 cheaper in the long term.
In addition to data capacity, Fusaka incorporates strategic backend improvements. For example, users will now be able to sign transactions using biometric systems (such as facial recognition on smartphones) and the network will be strengthened against attackers who attempt to saturate it with spam transactions (Denial-of-Service or DoS attacks).
Paul Brody, of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, contextualized the Ethereum Fusaka Upgrade as a long-term vision. “We are laying the foundation on the road to a trillion transactions a day,” he noted.
In summary, users will not see the effects of these “strategic improvements” immediately, but the path toward next-generation scalability is already laid out. The next major improvement, Glamsterdam, is expected next year and will continue the goal of further reducing costs on the main network.
