Ethereum’s Fusaka Upgrade: Scaling Rollups Without Breaking The Core

Bitwise Onchain Solutions discusses how Ethereum’s Fusaka upgrade trades big‑bang hard forks for faster, targeted changes that make the network more strategic.

Ethereum’s upcoming Fusaka upgrade on Wednesday is being framed as just another scaling step, but it marks a shift in how the network ships change. Instead of massive, multi‑year overhauls, Fusaka is the first proof that Ethereum can deliver focused, high‑impact upgrades in something closer to six months.

At the center of Fusaka is Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP)‑7594, Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS), the technical headline that changes how Ethereum handles data from rollups without forcing node operators to buy data‑center hardware or compromise on decentralization, in line with the roadmap the Ethereum Foundation laid out for the next 12 months.

“Ethereum is now trying to be more strategic in what it’s delivering and how quickly it’s delivering it,” Chris Berry, head of onchain engineering at Bitwise Onchain Solutions, one of the longest‑running institutional Ether (ETH) staking providers, told Cointelegraph.

Related: How the Fusaka upgrade fits into Ethereum’s long-term roadmap

After Dencun introduced blobs and Pectra tightened UX, Fusaka builds on that foundation. PeerDAS changes how nodes deal with rollup data. Rather than every validator downloading entire blobs, they only need to verify smaller pieces, sampled across the network. That cuts duplication and bandwidth, and frees up room for more data overall.

“There’s a lot of duplication that gets sent around the network,” Steve Berryman, head of client partnerships at Bitwise Onchain Solutions, said, adding, “PeerDAS reduces that duplication of data.”

Under the hood, the upgrade also formalizes a new process for adjusting blob capacity. Blobs are data packages used by Ethereum rollups to post large amounts of offchain transaction data to the main chain cheaply and efficiently, enabling high-throughput layer-2 scaling without bloating the entire blockchain.

Before Fusaka, changes to blob limits required a full hard fork. Now, Ethereum gets a “blob‑parameter‑only” schedule, and pre‑planned increases to blob targets can roll out without repeating the whole fork dance each time.

Fusaka isn’t only about throwing more bandwidth at the problem. It also tweaks how fees balance between layer 1 and layer 2. Ethereum’s rollup‑centric roadmap depends on a healthy symbiosis: L2s need cheap, reliable data space on L1, but L1 also need

Source: CoinTelegraph