Ethereum's Fusaka Upgrade: An Overview
On December 4th, Ethereum officially activated the Fusaka upgrade. Seemingly driven by this positive news, Ethereum spot ETFs saw a net inflow of $140 million yesterday, with no outflows from any of the nine products, demonstrating market optimism about Ethereum's fundamentals. As Ethereum's roadmap continues to evolve, each hard fork represents an important building block towards the goal of a "world computer."
The Fusaka upgrade serves as a bridge for Ethereum to transition to the "The Verge" and "The Purge" phases. It's not just a routine hard fork, but is seen as a crucial step for Ethereum to mitigate centralization risks and reduce hardware requirements. However, behind the beautiful technological vision, challenges remain in the form of increasing technical complexity.
PeerDAS Unlocks Scalability Cap, Further Empowering the L2 Ecosystem
The initiation of Ethereum's Fusaka upgrade signifies that the mainnet development has entered another key stage. The core theme of the Fusaka upgrade is the deployment of EIP-7594, which is the PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling) technology. The introduction of PeerDAS is aimed at fundamentally reshaping Ethereum's underlying architecture and data verification mechanism, significantly improving network scalability, security, and user experience.
Ethereum introduced the data container "Blob" through EIP-4844 (Proto-Danksharding) in the Dencun upgrade, successfully reducing L2 (Layer 2) transaction fees by 60% to 90%, greatly improving the Rollup user experience. However, Proto-Danksharding is just a temporary solution. While it created low-cost data space, it did not fundamentally increase the data capacity limit of the mainnet, failing to meet the needs of long-term large-scale applications.
PeerDAS will change the way the network collects and verifies L2 data, no longer requiring all nodes to store all Blob data. Based on PeerDAS technology, network nodes only need to store one-eighth of the Blob data to verify data availability and integrity through the data sampling mechanism. The improvement in storage efficiency allows the mainnet to significantly expand Blob without increasing the hardware burden on a single node. Theoretically, the PeerDAS design will unlock up to 8x scalability for Rollups. This also marks that Ethereum has officially taken the first step towards Full Danksharding, further reducing the fee burden on L2 by increasing Blob capacity.
As of now, perhaps because Ethereum has just completed the Fusaka upgrade, coupled with on-chain activity being in a lull period, significant changes have not yet appeared at the data level.
For L2 operators, PeerDAS can provide predictable data availability costs. This will encourage more data-intensive applications to be built, such as more complex DeFi protocols, large gaming platforms, or data storage tools, without worrying about high cost constraints. This architectural optimization will also enhance L2 stickiness, encouraging them to continue developing within the Ethereum ecosystem, further solidifying Ethereum's position as a "global settlement layer."
Fusaka Upgrade May Mitigate Geographic Centralization Risks While Lowering Hardware Thresholds
On November 20th, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated at Devconnect that if large institutions like BlackRock continue to expand their ETH holdings, the underlying technology roadmap may be dominated by institutional requirements, and it will be difficult for ordinary users to run nodes, leading to network and geographic centralization problems.
Although Ethereum has a large number of validator nodes, the geographic distribution is highly concentrated, mainly located in the US East Coast and Europe, where large staking service providers are densely located in a few low-latency areas. This phenomenon is a natural product of profit-seeking behavior under physical constraints. In Ethereum's consensus mechanism, low latency will help validators receive and propagate blocks faster, thereby obtaining more rewards to achieve higher overall profits. Currently, running an Ethereum validator node still represents a high hardware threshold, requiring hundreds of GB of hard drive space and a long synchronization time. Although these stringent technical and operational requirements can be easily borne by large staking service providers, they pose a serious obstacle to independent stakers. With the rapid growth of block data, this problem has gradually become apparent, and staking interests are concentrating in institutions and professional entities.
The Fusaka upgrade may mitigate this risk with the introduction of Verkle Trees. Verkle Trees is a new data structure algorithm aimed at replacing the current Merkle Patricia Trees to optimize on-chain data storage and node size. The breakthrough of this technology lies in that it will enable stateless validator clients. This means that when verifying transactions, nodes do not need to store all blockchain history state data locally.
Vitalik Buterin emphasized that Verkle Trees will reduce the hard drive space required to run a staking node to "close to zero" and achieve an "almost instant" synchronization time.
The lowering of the hardware threshold brought by Verkle Trees is a key measure at the technical level to combat geographic centralization risks. When the user experience of independent stakers is significantly improved, they will join or return on a large scale, thereby balancing the centralized trend of large staking pools. Ethereum's empowerment of individual participants is not only a technical optimization, but also a strong defense of the principles of decentralization.
Continued Accumulation of Technical Debt Will Become a Long-Term Challenge
Ethereum Foundation researcher Ansgar Dietrichs described PeerDAS as a "fundamental change" to the nature of L1. It's not just a simple software patch, but involves the underlying logic of the consensus layer for processing data availability proofs. This type of infrastructure reconstruction requires all clients in the Ethereum ecosystem to update and coordinate synchronously, which will significantly increase overall technical complexity. For example, Verkle Trees relies on Vector Commitment, which is a complex cryptographic construction. When these cryptographic structures are integrated into smart contracts, any minor errors can cause serious protocol-level vulnerabilities. In fact, every major upgrade of Ethereum is a deep reshaping of the underlying structure. The cascading effect of this technical complexity also leads to a large accumulation of technical debt. This will increase the difficulty for developers to maintain client code and implement security audits, and will also increase potential systemic risks. With the dramatic increase in network complexity, the focus of Ethereum's development is shifting from early performance optimization to stability, decentralization, and economic balance. How to maintain this increasingly complex protocol while adhering to the principles of decentralization will be a long-term challenge facing Ethereum.
The Fusaka upgrade is an integral part of Ethereum's path towards the "Endgame." It seeks to reshape the foundation of decentralization by reducing hardware requirements and paving the way for the prosperity of L2. This also represents that Ethereum is evolving from pursuing performance to pursuing sustainability. However, how to ensure security in an increasingly complex underlying architecture is a problem that developers must solve. For the community and investors, the Fusaka upgrade is not just a technical iteration, but also a reaffirmation of Ethereum's long-term value.
EN
