Ethereum’s Fusaka Upgrade Goes Live, Ushering In Next Phase of Network Scaling

• Ethereum completed its Fusaka upgrade, the second major update of the year, which aims to support the next stage of scaling and resulted in a 2% ETH price surge.
• The core feature, PeerDAS, allows nodes to store only a “slice” of Layer-2 data (blobs), effectively reducing bandwidth/storage demands and potentially creating an eightfold increase in blob throughput.
• The upgrade, which Vitalik Buterin called a realisation of the “sharding” vision, led to a surge in trading volume and strong buying from “shark” wallets (1k-10k ETH holders).

Ethereum (ETH) is up 2% in the last 24 hours, currently trading at US$3.16K (AU$4.78K). The modest surge comes shortly after the Ethereum Foundation announced the full activation of the Fusaka upgrade this Wednesday.

This is Ethereum’s second-largest upgrade this year after Pectra, which introduced eleven new Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), the largest number of any upgrade, and promised new features, including level-up account abstraction and a better staking experience.

Read more: Amundi Launches First Tokenised Money Market Fund Share Class on Ethereum

Fusaka Goes Live

Fusaka is now live and introduces a new way for the network to handle data that is meant to support the next stage of scaling.

The key change is PeerDAS, a system that lets each node store only a slice of the blob data attached to blocks instead of the full payload. Blobs are large, temporary data packages used to store data from Layer-2s on Ethereum.

This essentially cuts bandwidth and storage demands and creates room for roughly an eightfold increase in blob throughput compared with previous limits. 

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said this effectively delivers the “sharding” vision the project has been working toward since its early years.

Fusaka also adds tools to adjust blob capacity through “Blob-Parameter-Only” changes, so developers can raise blob limits later without doing a full hard fork. Fee tweaks are designed to stop blob fees from crashing when normal gas fees spike, helping keep rollup data space more stable. 

Ethereum developers have added that additional minor changes should make transactions safer and easier to run, supporting lower costs and more decentralisation over time.

The upgrade was activated at block 18,200,000 after testing on Holesky, Sepolia, and Hoodi. 

After activation, ETH trading volume rose from roughly US$28.2 billion (AU$43.15 billion) to US$32 billion (AU$48.96 billion) over about six hours, with analytics firm Santiment pointing to strong buying from “shark” wallets holding 1,000–10,000 ETH.

Most valuation models suggest ETH is heavily undervalued, with its ideal pricing sitting at over US$9K (AU$13.6K), as Crypto News Australia reported.

Related: Dormant Ethereum Whale Awakens After 10 Years

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