Ethereum jumps 4.5% after successful Fusaka upgrade

Source: PortaldoBitcoin Original Title: Ethereum jumps 4.5% after successful Fusaka upgrade Original Link: Ethereum activated its Fusaka upgrade on the mainnet on Wednesday, bringing the network’s second major upgrade of the year and introducing changes to data availability and block capacity that, according to developers, will define its next phase of scalability.

The upgrade was activated at block height 18,200,000 late yesterday afternoon, following test deployments on the Holesky, Sepolia, and Hoodi testnets throughout October. Final readiness checks were completed by client teams earlier this week.

Ethereum’s price surged, trading between approximately $3,150 and $3,210 in the hours following Fusaka’s implementation, rising steadily overnight on Wednesday and into the early hours of Thursday. Currently, it is up 4.5% on the day, quoted at $3,200.

Trading volume increased from $28.2 billion to $32 billion in about six hours. The price surge was attributed to a “strong accumulation of large investor wallets” holding between 1,000 and 10,000 ETH, according to an initial analysis by Santiment.

The Fusaka activation “finally aligns” its base layer “with the scale of activity already taking place” across its second-layer ecosystem, according to expert analysis.

“Before the Fusaka activation, we saw signs of preparation for higher data volumes on second-layer networks, with the most visible change in publishing patterns,” they reported.

Several rollups are “increasing the regularity of root state submissions and adjusting intervals between blocks,” a trend that could mean “smoother sequencing and more regular batch updates.”

“The trend is incremental, not disruptive, but it is noticeable. This suggests an ecosystem preparing for more capacity and a more predictable data volume.”

The Arrival of PeerDAS on Ethereum

Fusaka introduces PeerDAS, a data availability sampling system that allows each node to store only a fraction of the blob data sent, instead of every byte. This reduces bandwidth and storage requirements and gives the network room to expand blob processing capacity by about eight times compared to previous limits.

“PeerDAS in Fusaka is important because it literally represents sharding. Sharding has been a dream for Ethereum since 2015, and data availability sampling since 2017, and now we have it,” said Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co-founder.

The upgrade also enables Blob-Parameter-Only (BPO) configuration changes, which allow clients to increase blob capacity without a full hard fork, according to Ethereum’s official roadmap.

Along with changes to the base fee for blobs, the upgrade prevents blob fees from collapsing when gas prices spike—the gas that pays for transaction execution and smart contract logic on Ethereum.

Fusaka also adds tweaks that make transactions more secure and easier to execute, which, according to developers, may help reduce costs and support decentralization as network activity grows.

Major Upgrade

Fusaka appears to be an “infrastructure-focused upgrade.” The changes included are “long-standing requests” and “significantly expand capacity without disrupting the fundamentals of the system.”

These improvements will likely “influence how value flows through Ethereum’s base layer, with the most direct beneficiary being the first-layer block space.”

“When the network becomes more efficient at execution management or processing larger data volumes, the effects will likely lead to a gradual increase in fee burning and validator rewards. These increases won’t be immediately visible, but will accumulate slowly as network activity rises.”

Fusaka “would change the competitive positioning among rollups” and help “define the subsequent effects of the next cycle.”

Rollups are Ethereum second-layer scalability solutions that execute transactions off-chain but send transaction data to the main network.

The upgrade “represents a structural improvement in Ethereum’s settlement architecture.”

“By reducing the data load that rollups and validators need to process, the network becomes more predictable in terms of performance and cost. This predictability is what regulated institutions look for when assessing whether a public blockchain can support large-scale issuance and post-trade activity.”

Fusaka effectively “lowers the operational threshold for node participation” in a way that broadens the validator base and reduces concentration risk.

“Capital markets rely on resilient networks with no single point of failure, and greater decentralization directly contributes to meeting this need.”