Ethereum has officially implemented its Fusaka upgrade, designed to increase the network’s transaction processing capacity while maintaining security and decentralization standards, according to network documentation.
ETH co-founder Vitalik Buterin tipped his hat to the developers behind the initiative.
Summary
- Ethereum rolls out Fusaka upgrade to boost transaction processing while keeping security and decentralization intact.
- Key innovation is EIP-7594 (PeerDAS), allowing nodes to verify block data without downloading everything, improving efficiency.
- Upgrade supports scaling and DeFi growth, helping Ethereum handle millions of daily transactions and maintain its leading smart contract ecosystem.
“Big congrats to the Ethereum researchers and core devs who worked hard for years to make this happen,” the 31-year-old entrepreneur said on X late Wednesday.
PeerDAS in Fusaka is significant because it literally is sharding.
Ethereum is coming to consensus on blocks without requiring any single node to see more than a tiny fraction of the data. And this is robust to 51% attacks – it’s client-side probabilistic verification, not… pic.twitter.com/OK81xBteER
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) December 3, 2025
Expanding network capacity, preserving existing security
The Fusaka upgrade went live on the network’s final testnet, Hoodi, in October.
It centers on EIP-7594: PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling), a protocol that allows Ethereum nodes to verify block data completeness without requiring full data downloads. The implementation aims to expand network capacity while preserving existing security and decentralization parameters.
Ethereum, the largest smart contract blockchain by total value locked, holds over $73 billion in decentralized finance (DeFi) applications. The network processes between 1.3 million and 1.8 million transactions daily, according to data from Etherscan, a blockchain analytics platform.
The Fusaka upgrade represents part of Ethereum’s ongoing development roadmap focused on scaling solutions, specifically sharding. This blockchain scaling method splits the network into smaller pieces, allowing nodes to process a portion of transactions while maintaining security, dramatically increasing throughput.
Network developers have positioned the upgrade as a technical advancement in Ethereum’s capacity to handle increased transaction volumes without compromising the distributed nature of the blockchain’s validator network.
“Sharding has been a dream for Ethereum since 2015… and data availability sampling since 2017,” Buterin wrote, citing a GitHub post. “And now we have it.”
Price action
Ethereum topped $3,000 after the upgrade went live. At last check, it was up about 5%, trading at around $3,162.
Read more: Ethereum co-founder Buterin allocates 256 ETH to privacy messaging projects
