Ethereum's Fusaka upgrade, slated for November 2025, focuses on enhancing scalability and efficiency through key infrastructure improvements.

Executive Summary

Ethereum's Fusaka upgrade, scheduled for activation between November 5th and 12th, 2025, represents a critical step in the network's evolution towards enhanced scalability and efficiency. This hard fork bundles 11 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) focused on infrastructure-level refinements without disrupting existing smart contracts. The upgrade aims to improve transaction throughput, reduce fees, and optimize node operation, paving the way for broader adoption and institutional integration.

The Event in Detail

The Fusaka upgrade focuses on enhancing Ethereum's Layer 1 (L1) capabilities to better support Layer 2 (L2) scaling solutions. Key features include EIP-7594 (PeerDAS), which introduces peer data availability sampling to reduce the load on nodes and boost rollup performance, and EIP-7934 (RLP Execution Block Size Limit), which sets an upper cap on encoded block sizes to limit bloat and support scalability. According to Vitalik Buterin's publicly shared data from April 2025, Ethereum L1 throughput is currently 15 transactions per second. The Fusaka upgrade intends to significantly improve these metrics.

EIP-7935 (Default Block Gas Limit) aims to increase the gas limit from around 45 million to 150 million units, enabling more transactions per block, with the goal of steadier gas fees and smoother transaction flow for users. Additionally, EIP-7951 (secp256r1 Precompile) brings native support for the P-256 elliptic curve, aligning Ethereum closer to Web2 security standards.

Market Implications

The Fusaka upgrade is expected to have a positive impact on the Ethereum ecosystem, making it more competitive with other blockchain platforms. By reducing transaction fees and increasing throughput, Fusaka could attract more developers and users to the Ethereum network. If Fusaka can be launched as planned by the end of 2025, it is generally expected to bring another round of order of magnitude improvement to the L2 data space. L2 transaction fees may be further reduced in the next 1-2 years,

If DAS is fully implemented in the future, the theoretical maximum capacity can reach 512 Blobs/block. Once implemented, L2's processing power (TPS) is expected to leap to tens of thousands, which will greatly improve the availability and cost structure of high-frequency interaction scenarios such as on-chain DApps, DeFi, social networks, and games.

This could lead to increased adoption of decentralized applications (dApps) and decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, as well as greater institutional investment in the Ethereum ecosystem. The focus on L1 scaling and increased efficiency could attract more institutional investment and drive demand for ETH.

Expert Commentary

The Ethereum Foundation has undertaken a strategic shift, prioritizing user experience (UX) and Layer-1 (L1) scalability. This move marks a departure from a strictly rollup-centric roadmap and aims to make the Ethereum mainnet itself more efficient, usable, and ready for mass adoption. According to the Ethereum Foundation, the Fusaka upgrade aims to enable 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) via Layer 2 (L2) solutions by distributing data availability checks across nodes.

Broader Context

The Fusaka upgrade is part of a broader trend in the blockchain industry towards improving scalability and efficiency. Other blockchain platforms are also working on similar upgrades, and the success of Fusaka could influence the direction of development in the industry. The upgrade is part of Ethereum's new six-month upgrade cadence and paves the way for the 2026 'Glamsterdam' fork, which could introduce 6-second block times. Glamsterdam is expected to introduce the transition to Verkle trees, which will improve how Ethereum stores data and validates transactions, setting the stage for greater scalability and efficiency.