Fusaka upgrade pushes Ethereum toward higher throughput

In this post we’re discussing what the upcoming upgrade is expected to unlock for users.

Ethereum’s next major upgrade, Fusaka, is scheduled to go live on December 3. It’s the network’s first upgrade since Pectra in early May - and its impact is expected to be felt across every rollup, wallet and dApp that depends on Ethereum for data and settlement. In practical terms, Fusaka opens a path for rollups to substantially scale Ethereum’s throughput.

Actually, Fusaka consists of two coordinated hard forks. Fulu updates the consensus layer, the part of Ethereum where validators agree on the chain’s history. Osaka upgrades the execution layer, where transactions are processed. Together, they continue a transition toward a more modular Ethereum. The aim is a network in which consensus is rebuilt as Lean Consensus and the L1 verifies tiny zero-knowledge proofs instead of re-executing transactions. That long-term shift will take several years, but Fusaka delivers meaningful gains right now.

“This upgrade is going to directly benefit 1inch users because it is reducing the cost of transacting on layer 2 networks,” explains Tanner Moore, Developer Relations Engineer at 1inch. “Lower transaction costs means 1inch users get better rates across all of our swapping platforms.”

According to Tanner, in a theoretical future where Ethereum gas costs are effectively zero, on-chain trading will be competing directly with centralized exchanges on profit margins, giving the upper hand to decentralized protocols, like 1inch. “On an even playing field, DeFi will win,” Tanner charges.

The main Ethereum scalability-focused improvement proposals (EIPs) to be implemented under the Fusaka upgrade are:

• [EIP-7594] This EIP introduces PeerDAS, which lets nodes download only small slices of a blob instead of the whole thing. This increases how many blobs Ethereum can handle at once, letting rollups process far more transactions at lower cost. This is the flagship EIP, relieving the main bottleneck for L2 scalability which is blob throughput.
• [EIP-7935] This formally directs client teams to set the new default gas limit to 60M, further signaling to the community the ongoing push for a higher throughput layer 1.
• [EIP-7892] This EIP is going to make further blob scaling much more simple and consistent with the introduction of parameter-only hardforks called BPO (Blob Parameter Only) forks.

Overall, Fusaka is expected to have a major impact across DeFi. “Fusaka's focus on scalability is one more step towards DeFi eating into CEX trading volume,” Tanner concludes. “There might even be companies in the future that operate like Coinbase, but have DeFi powering the entire operation without the user realizing it.”

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