‘It’s a Really Big Deal’: Ethereum Developers Set Final Date for Fusaka Upgrade

ethereumThe network’s core developers have officially set a date for the next major network update.

U Face upgrade will go live in just over a month, on December 3, the developers agreed during a meeting Thursday.

The date had been proposed for the implementation of Fusaka, but not formally finalized. On Tuesday, the update released its third and final testnet Test suit without a hitch, paving the way for its mainnet activation.

“People I’ve talked to in the community are very excited about it,” Alex Stokes, the Ethereum developer who led Thursday’s meeting, said of Fusaka. “It’s really a big deal.”

The highly anticipated software update seeks to make Ethereum significantly more scalable by optimizing how the network collects and verifies data from layer 2 chains. It introduces several proposals focused on improving efficiency and user experience, building on the progress made in previous updates.

Ethereum’s Dencun 2024 upgrade introduced “blobs”, a feature that allows temporary storage of layer 2 data on Ethereum transaction blocks. The innovation has greatly reduced gas fees and processing time for layer-2 transactions.

Fusaka will develop the innovation by increasing the blob space available in each Ethereum transaction block – a move that Ethereum developers anticipate will make layer 2 transactions even faster and nearly free over time.

The expansion is fueled by a new data sampling method, introduced at Fusaka, called PeerDAS. While PeerDAS was originally planned for Ethereum’s February 2025 Pectra update, it was ultimately delayed to allow for more testing.

Backers, including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, see PeerDAS as vital to Ethereum’s long-term scalability, as the feature should allow layer 2 networks to handle a much larger number of transactions at near-zero cost.

Buterin has described PeerDAS as “the key to layer 2 scaling,” suggesting that Fusaka could mark a major step toward Ethereum’s ultimate goal of becoming a global settlement layer for all on-chain transactions once the crypto achieves mass adoption.

It is not clear whether the Fusaka update, if successfully implemented, will significantly affect the price of Ethereum. ETH is down about 2.3% this week, at $3,760 to write In the days following the previous network update, Pectra, ETH done rises by almost 29% – but that bump also coincides with other positive macroeconomic developments.

Users on Myriad, a prediction market operated by DecryptDastan, the parent company of ETH, argues that ETH is more likely to surpass the next $4,500 rather than fall below $3,100. But his degree of confidence is not iron –at 61% to 39% probabilityrespectively.