Ethereum has activated its long-awaited Fusaka upgrade, a milestone that significantly boosts the network’s capacity to process transactions while preserving its core principles of security and decentralization. According to the project’s technical documentation, the upgrade is specifically engineered to let Ethereum handle far more data without forcing individual nodes to shoulder the full load of that data.
Co-founder Vitalik Buterin publicly applauded the release, emphasizing how long the ecosystem has been working toward this moment. “Big congrats to the Ethereum researchers and core devs who worked hard for years to make this happen,” the 31-year-old developer wrote on X late Wednesday, highlighting the depth and duration of the research effort that led to Fusaka.
At the heart of the upgrade is EIP-7594, which introduces PeerDAS—short for Peer Data Availability Sampling. This new mechanism allows Ethereum nodes to probabilistically verify that block data is fully available across the network without needing to download the entire data set themselves. In practice, that means the chain can safely carry much larger blocks, and therefore more transactions, while individual nodes only ever process a small portion of the data.
Buterin underscored just how transformative PeerDAS is for Ethereum’s long-term roadmap, calling it “literally sharding.” With PeerDAS, Ethereum can reach consensus on blocks even though no single node sees more than a tiny slice of the underlying data. The design is meant to be robust even in the face of severe adversarial conditions, including hypothetical 51% attacks, because validation is performed via client-side probabilistic sampling rather than trusting any one participant to see everything.
Before reaching mainnet, the Fusaka upgrade was deployed and tested on Ethereum’s final testnet, Hoodi, in October. That test phase allowed client teams and researchers to validate that PeerDAS and the associated protocol changes behaved as expected under real-world network conditions, from bandwidth constraints to node diversity. Only after those tests did developers greenlight the activation on the primary Ethereum network.
The upgrade arrives at a time when Ethereum is already the dominant smart contract blockchain by total value locked, securing more than 73 billion dollars across decentralized finance applications. The network routinely processes between 1.3 million and 1.8 million transactions every day, according to on-chain analytics. Scaling pressure, driven by both DeFi and newer use cases like NFTs, gaming, and rollups, has kept transaction throughput and fees at the center of Ethereum’s technical agenda.
Fusaka is a major step in that agenda because it pushes forward Ethereum’s sharding-based scaling vision. Sharding, in simple terms, slices the blockchain into multiple logical segments so that different groups of nodes can handle different chunks of data and transactions simultaneously. Rather than demanding that every node process everything, the network uses cryptographic and probabilistic techniques to ensure the system remains secure and consistent even though each participant only sees part of the whole.
Developers have framed Fusaka as a foundational upgrade rather than a cosmetic improvement. By enabling higher data throughput without sacrificing the distributed nature of Ethereum’s validator set, it strengthens the network’s ability to grow alongside user demand. In particular, it lays crucial groundwork for rollups and other layer-2 solutions, which depend heavily on cheap, plentiful blockspace to publish their transaction data back to the main chain.
Buterin has often described sharding and data availability sampling as core ambitions of Ethereum’s post-launch roadmap. “Sharding has been a dream for Ethereum since 2015… and data availability sampling since 2017,” he wrote, pointing to earlier technical discussions. With Fusaka now live, he noted, “we have it,” signaling that what was once a theoretical research goal has become a working feature on the main network.
Market participants reacted quickly to the development. After the upgrade went live, the price of ether climbed above the 3,000-dollar mark. Recent quotes showed ETH trading around 3,162 dollars, up roughly 5 percent over the period following Fusaka’s activation. While short-term price moves can be influenced by many factors, the rally reflects investor optimism that enhanced scalability strengthens Ethereum’s long-term competitive position.
Beyond immediate throughput gains, PeerDAS reshapes how Ethereum thinks about node participation and decentralization. Traditional scaling strategies often require more powerful hardware, which risks squeezing out smaller operators and moving the network toward centralization. With data availability sampling, nodes can remain lightweight: they verify only randomly selected pieces of a block while still gaining strong cryptographic assurance that the entire block is available. This design keeps the barrier to entry low, supporting a broad and geographically distributed validator set.
The upgrade is also strategically important for rollups, which have become Ethereum’s primary scaling solution in recent years. Rollups batch large numbers of transactions off-chain, then post compressed data to Ethereum for final settlement and security. The cost of that data posting is directly tied to Ethereum’s data throughput and pricing. By increasing the amount of data the base layer can safely handle, Fusaka is expected to lower the effective costs for rollups, improving user experience with cheaper and faster transactions across various layer-2 ecosystems.
From a security standpoint, Fusaka introduces new verification logic while staying within Ethereum’s conservative risk framework. Client-side probabilistic verification means that even if an attacker controlled a majority of block producers, they would still struggle to hide missing data from the network as a whole. Randomized sampling and redundancy in verification make it exceedingly difficult to slip incomplete or invalid data through consensus, aligning with Ethereum’s focus on defense-in-depth.
Fusaka also has implications for Ethereum’s broader technological roadmap, including future phases of sharding and potential refinements to the consensus layer. With PeerDAS in place, developers can experiment more confidently with larger block sizes and more complex data structures, knowing that nodes are no longer forced to fully download everything. This flexibility opens the door to more advanced forms of data sharding and innovations in how the network handles specialized transaction types, like those used by high-frequency DeFi protocols or large-scale gaming platforms.
On the ecosystem level, the upgrade sets expectations for application developers and infrastructure providers. As throughput increases and data availability becomes more efficient, DeFi platforms, NFT markets, and on-chain games can design products that assume a higher baseline of transaction capacity. That could encourage more complex financial primitives, richer game mechanics, and enterprise-grade tokenization projects that previously hesitated due to congestion and fee uncertainty.
Economically, a more scalable Ethereum also shifts the competitive landscape among layer-1 blockchains. Many rival networks have attempted to differentiate themselves through higher throughput and lower fees, sometimes at the cost of decentralization. By rolling out Fusaka while explicitly preserving its decentralization guarantees, Ethereum aims to narrow the performance gap without sacrificing the trust-minimized properties that anchored its early success. If successful, this balance could draw more capital, developers, and users back toward the Ethereum ecosystem.
There are, however, ongoing challenges and open questions. Monitoring tools, client implementations, and validator operations all need to adapt to the new mechanics introduced by PeerDAS. Node operators must ensure their setups are correctly configured to perform sampling and validation, and client teams will be watching closely for any unforeseen edge cases or performance bottlenecks. Over the coming months, real-world data on block sizes, network latency, and average fees will help determine how effectively Fusaka is delivering on its promises.
In parallel, the community will be assessing how the upgrade interacts with other planned improvements, such as further refinements to rollup-centric scaling, enhancements to the execution layer, and possible future upgrades aimed at improving user privacy or interoperability. Fusaka is not the final step in Ethereum’s evolution, but it marks a turning point in showing that advanced research ideas like data availability sampling can survive contact with production usage at massive scale.
For everyday users, many of these changes will be invisible at the technical level. What they are likely to notice over time is more consistent transaction throughput, better performance from layer-2 networks, and a broader range of applications that feel smoother and more affordable to use. Developers, meanwhile, gain a more robust foundation for building high-volume applications without constantly worrying that network congestion will undermine their user experience.
Taken together, the Fusaka upgrade signals that Ethereum is entering a new phase: one where long-theorized scalability technologies are finally arriving on mainnet, and where the network’s growth no longer has to come at the expense of security and decentralization. With PeerDAS now live and sharding no longer just a distant aspiration, Ethereum’s path toward supporting global-scale financial and computational activity looks more concrete than at any time since its launch.