Pectra's Triumph: Ethereum's Latest Update Exceeds Expectations, Paving the Way for Fusaka

Ethereum's recent Pectra update has successfully met its anticipated performance benchmarks, particularly concerning its enhanced blob capacity. This positive outcome allows core development teams to shift their focus towards the upcoming Fusaka upgrade, which aims to introduce significant data availability improvements and further optimize the network's efficiency.

Pectra's Performance Validation

The Pectra hard fork, initiated via Ethereum Improvement Proposal 7691 (EIP-7691) on May 7, aimed to significantly increase the network's blob capacity. A May 30 report by ethPandaOps confirmed that the update is operating within expected thresholds. Key findings include:

• Doubled Blob Count: The update successfully doubled the default blob count from three to six and lifted the ceiling from six to nine.

• Home User Node Performance: Home-user nodes accepted locally built solo-staker blocks in under four seconds 99.5% of the time, demonstrating robust performance at the network edge.

• Bandwidth Sensitivity: Pre-fork modeling, which assumed bandwidth sensitivity, was validated as home users were able to support nine blobs.

Stress Testing and Future Capacity

The report also stress-tested the network against a worst-case block size of 60 million gas, representing the upper bound under Pectra. While this scenario trimmed the safe capacity to 10 blobs, it still cleared the live 6/9 envelope. This analysis reinforces community calls to halt future gas limit increases until Peer-to-Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS) is implemented in the subsequent Fusaka release.

Managing Relay Timing and Fusaka's Role

Relay-sourced blocks, which account for approximately 91% of main-chain blocks, showed slightly slower

Sources

• Ethereum's Pectra update meets expectations, edges closer to Fusaka, CryptoSlate.