Ethereum Mainnet Successfully Activates Fusaka Upgrade: 8x Rollup Throughput Now Live

The Ethereum mainnet officially activated the Fusaka hard fork at epoch 411392, marking the network’s second major upgrade of the year after Pectra.

Announced moments later by Ethereum’s official X account, the upgrade introduces PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling) and a series of complementary optimizations that dramatically boost Layer 2 scalability while keeping full-node hardware requirements in check.

Key Features Unlocked with Fusaka

1. PeerDAS (EIP-7840) The headline upgrade replaces full blob downloading with lightweight sampling across the peer-to-peer layer. Nodes now only need to store and serve ~12.5% (1/8th) of total blob data while still guaranteeing 100% availability, paving the way for rollups to scale aggregated throughput by up to 8× (theoretical ceiling of ~128–160 MB/s across all L2s combined).
2. R1 Curve Precompiles & Preconfirmations New cryptographic primitives reduce gas costs for common rollup operations and enable sub-block preconfirmation guarantees, delivering near-instant transaction inclusion signals for L2 users.
3. Blob Market & Gas Pricing Fixes Refined EIP-7691 mechanics correct previous overcharging bugs and make data posting cheaper and more predictable during congestion.
4. Paving the Way for Future L1 Gas Limit Increases By drastically lowering data-availability overhead, Fusaka lays the technical foundation for safely raising the L1 gas target from 30M to 45M+ in upcoming upgrades (potentially as early as the next hard fork in 2026).

Immediate Impact and Monitoring

As of activation, all major client combinations (Geth+ Prysm, Nethermind + Lighthouse, etc.) reported successful transitions with zero chain splits. Blob utilization is expected to climb steadily from the current ~40% average toward 80–90% over the coming weeks as Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, and zkSync roll out PeerDAS-compatible sequencers.

The Ethereum Foundation and core dev teams will continue 24/7 monitoring over the next day, with full post-mortem and performance dashboards to be published by the weekend.

Market Reaction

ETH price reacted modestly on the news, trading up ~1.8% to $2,912 in the hours following activation — a muted response typical of infrastructure-focused upgrades whose benefits accrue gradually to Layer 2 ecosystems rather than the L1 token directly.

Longer term, Fusaka is widely regarded as one of the most important scalability milestones since the Dencun upgrade in March 2024, ensuring Ethereum remains competitive against high-TPS monolithic chains while preserving decentralization.

In short: the pipes just got a lot bigger. The real fireworks will come when the biggest L2s flip the switch on full PeerDAS utilization in Q1 2026.