The Fusaka Ethereum update has been activated on the Sepolia testnet, marking another essential step in the network’s ongoing efforts to improve scalability and performance.
The update is the second phase of a three-phase rollout in line with Fusaka’s Ethereum roadmap, following the activation of the Holesky testnet on October 1. The Sepolia rollout is focused on stress testing the network’s modern data accessibility system and higher block gas limit before developers push code to Hoodi’s final testnet later this month.
Fusaka’s implementation introduces a suite of performance and consensus improvements. The full update aims to escalate Ethereum’s block gas limit to 60 million, allowing blocks to process more transactions and sophisticated intelligent contract activities while testing whether nodes can maintain stability with higher throughput.
“Customer teams have performed solid engineering work to ensure that current node configurations, both in terms of hardware and network, can reliably support 60 million gas blocks without the risk of network instability,” Gabriel Trintinalia, protocol engineer at Consensys customer Besu and lead developer for the upgrade, told Cointelegraph.
Since larger blocks cause nodes to process and store more data, peer data availability sampling (PeerDAS) is also tested.
PeerDAS allows Ethereum validators to verify transaction data by sampling tiny snippets from multiple peers rather than downloading everything, improving speed and scalability while maintaining a decentralized operation.
Paul Harris, Fusaka’s other lead programmer and a protocol engineer on Consensys’ Teku client, said that under PeerDAS, validators no longer have to store all network data, which significantly reduces the load on nodes.
“Fusaka is changing the way we ensure data availability, enabling scale beyond what was possible before PeerDAS,” Harris said.
The Ethereum Foundation unveiled the Fusaka testnet schedule on September 26, outlining the final steps before the next major network upgrade. Fusaka follows this year’s Pectra update, with the final trial on the Hoodi testnet taking place on October 28, with a mainnet launch expected in December.
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A brief history of Ethereum updates
Since its launch in July 2015, the Ethereum network has undergone several major updates to improve scalability, security, and performance.
The last review took place on May 7, when the Pectra update went live, introducing three key improvement proposals. Among the changes, Pectra allowed external accounts to function like intelligent contracts and pay gas fees in non-ETH tokens, and raised the validator staking limit to 2,048 ETH from 32 ETH. The update also increased the number of data blobs allowed per block.
Before Pectra, Ethereum performed the Dencun update on March 13, 2024, drastically reducing the cost of gas fees on the network. Within a year of Dencun’s upgrade, average gas fees on Ethereum dropped by as much as 95%.
Perhaps the most famed Ethereum upgrade is known as The Merge, which took place in September 2022 and transformed Ethereum from a proof-of-work blockchain to a proof-of-stake blockchain.
The merger resulted in the end of mining and the introduction of validators, as well as a reduction in energy costs by up to 99%.
The April 2023 Shanghai update was also a critical step in the network’s roadmap, as it allowed validators staking Ether (ETH) to make withdrawals for the first time and completed Ethereum’s transition to proof of stake.
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