At approximately 5:50 AM Beijing time early Thursday, as the Ethereum mainnet reached epoch 411,392, the major network upgrade codenamed "Fusaka" was successfully activated across the network. This not only marks another critical iteration completed by Ethereum in just about seven months following the "Pectra" upgrade in May of this year but also signifies the arrival of a strategic turning point: Ethereum's core development roadmap has officially entered a normalized accelerated rhythm of "two hard forks per year," injecting new momentum into its continuous evolution.
This upgrade is numbered as the 17th major hard fork in Ethereum's history. The well-known blockchain technology company Consensys has clearly stated that Ethereum's research and development teams have established "executing two mainnet upgrades per year" as a clear future goal. This acceleration plan stands in sharp contrast to Ethereum's development pace in recent years. Looking back since the landmark "The Merge" in 2022 (transitioning from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake), the Ethereum network has generally maintained a rhythm of one major upgrade per year: the 2023 "Shapella" upgrade enabled staked ETH withdrawals, the 2024 "Dencun" upgrade significantly reduced Layer2 rollup transaction costs through Proto-Danksharding, and the early 2025 "Pectra" upgrade further optimized user experience and wallet security. The activation of Fusaka officially breaks this annual cycle, heralding Ethereum's development process entering a new, more intensive, and more agile phase.
The "Fusaka" upgrade itself is far from a simple adjustment in rhythm; its technical substance is equally substantial. This upgrade includes a total of 9 core Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) and 4 supporting EIPs. Measured by the number of proposals and the scope of changes, this upgrade is one of the largest in Ethereum's history, and its complexity and impact should not be underestimated.
Among the numerous technical updates, the most anticipated is the new data availability sampling technology called "PeerDAS." Data Availability (DA) is the core foundation ensuring the security and reliability of blockchain scaling solutions (especially Rollups), guaranteeing that network participants can verify whether all transaction data is publicly accessible. The introduction of PeerDAS aims to optimize the network's ability to handle data availability through more efficient and decentralized data sampling and propagation mechanisms. This improvement is expected to further increase the data processing capacity of the Ethereum mainnet, providing more robust and economical data-layer support for Layer2 scaling solutions, thereby indirectly reducing transaction costs for end-users and raising the scalability ceiling of the entire ecosystem. It is foreseeable that PeerDAS will become a crucial technological stepping stone for Ethereum's future realization of its full sharding vision.
Beyond the highlight of PeerDAS, the Fusaka upgrade also encompasses several improvements aimed at enhancing user experience (UX) and network performance. These improvements may involve aspects such as transaction execution efficiency, the convenience of smart contract interactions, client synchronization speed, and fine-tuning of network resource pricing mechanisms. The implementation of each EIP is the result of months of rigorous discussion, testing, and consensus formation within Ethereum's vast developer community, collectively pushing this globally leading smart contract platform towards a more efficient, robust, and user-friendly direction.
In summary, the successful activation of the Fusaka upgrade holds dual milestone significance. On the technical level, it tangibly enhances Ethereum's data processing and scaling potential by introducing key technologies like PeerDAS. On the governance and development model level, it formally establishes the accelerated rhythm of "two hard forks per year," demonstrating the strong determination and execution power of the Ethereum ecosystem to address challenges and continuously innovate. This marks Ethereum's transition from its previous, relatively stable "major version" update model to a faster evolutionary channel with greater iterative efficiency. For developers, node operators, DApp users, and even the entire cryptocurrency industry, this means more frequent feature updates, more timely performance optimizations, and a more predictable technical roadmap. Ethereum is accelerating forward on its journey to build a decentralized finance and global computing platform with faster strides.
