Ethereum's Fusaka Upgrade: A Leap Towards Enhanced Performance and Scalability

Ethereum is gearing up for its significant Fusaka upgrade, a strategic move aimed at bolstering network performance and smart contract capabilities. This update, expected in late 2025, introduces several key Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) designed to enhance scalability, improve Web2 compatibility, and refine overall network efficiency without introducing radical new features.

Key Takeaways

• The Fusaka upgrade focuses on precise optimizations of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and blob management.

• It includes four pivotal EIPs: EIP-7907, EIP-7934, EIP-7951, and EIP-7939.

• A potential increase in the gas limit to 45 million units could boost transaction capacity by over 11%.

• Improved blob management aims to prevent network abuse and enhance block space efficiency.

• The upgrade seeks to improve integration with mainstream web infrastructure and optimize cryptographic calculations.

Enhancing Smart Contract Capabilities and Network Stability

One of the most anticipated changes in the Fusaka upgrade is EIP-7907, which dramatically increases the smart contract code size limit from 24KB to 256KB. This expansion allows for the deployment of more complex and feature-rich decentralized applications (dApps), particularly in areas like DeFi and on-chain gaming. To ensure fair performance, a new gas metering system will charge 2 gas for every 32-byte word beyond the initial 24KB.

EIP-7934 is another crucial update, introducing a protocol-level hard size limit on RLP-encoded execution blocks at 10 MiB, with an additional 2 MiB buffer for beacon blocks. This measure is designed to prevent large data blocks from negatively impacting network performance or making it vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks, thereby buttressing Ethereum's core infrastructure for long-term health as transaction volumes scale globally.

Bridging Web2 and Optimizing Computation

Fusaka also aims to close the gap between Ethereum and traditional Web2 systems with EIP-7951. This EIP provides a precompiled contract for verifying ECDSA signatures using the secp256r1 curve (P-256), a standard widely used in Web2 systems. This integration will facilitate easier connections between Ethereum and mainstream web infrastructure, including WebAuthn-based authentication.

Furthermore, EIP-7939 introduces a new opcode, CLZ (Count Leading Zeros), which determines the number of zeros in front of a 256-bit number. This lightweight yet powerful operation is valuable for cryptographic calculations, data packing, and other low-level routines, optimizing contract logic and improving developer ergonomics.

Blob Management and Future Outlook

Building on the Dencun fork's EIP-4844, Fusaka refines blob data handling. EIP-7892 caps the number of blobs a single transaction can include, preventing any one rollup from monopolizing data space. Concurrently, EIP-7918 sets a minimum fee and maximum number of blobs per block, balancing scalability with network safety and ensuring efficient use of block space.

While some developers, like Georgios Konstantopoulos of Paradigm, have expressed concerns about the omission of fixes for issues like "stack too deep" errors and the 24KB bytecode limit, the overall consensus among core developers is that Fusaka represents a pragmatic and strategic step towards controlled scalability. The upgrade, with its focus on technical sobriety and responsive governance, is expected to lay a stronger foundation for innovation on the Ethereum network.

Sources

• Ethereum Rolls Out 4 New EIPs In Fusaka Upgrade To Power, TronWeekly.

• A Key Update to Boost Scalability, Cointribune.

• Gas, blobs and EIPs: Fusaka to boost Ethereum’s performance, Blockworks.

• Best Crypto to Buy Now Ahead of Ethereum’s Game-Changing Fusaka Update, The Cryptonomist.

• Ethereum Devs scale back Devnet 2 testing priorities for upcoming Fusaka hard fork, The Block.