Tomorrow is the Big Day for Ethereum: Here’s Everything That’s Changing and What It Means

Ethereum is rolling out its “Fusaka” upgrade tomorrow, which includes 13 major improvement proposals (EIPs) affecting the fundamental operation of the network, from scalability and security to user experience and DoS resistance.

This update is seen as one of Ethereum’s most comprehensive technical improvements in recent years, especially in terms of the Layer-2 ecosystem, node operators, developers, and user experience.

The most notable innovations with Fusaka are the significant increase in blob data capacity added to blocks, security-focused parameter improvements, faster synchronization, cheaper smart contract running costs, and new encryption standards compatible with mobile devices.

One of Fusaka’s key focuses is on three critical EIPs that improve the scalability of blob data that Layer-2s send to Ethereum:

• EIP-7594 – PeerDAS: Multiplies scaling by allowing nodes to store only a portion of the blob data, rather than the entire data. This method allows for increased blob capacity.
• EIP-7892 – Blob-Parameter-Only Forks: Hard forks are no longer required to increase the number of blobs. Capacity will automatically double after one month, then gradually increase from 6 blobs per block to 128 blobs per block.
• EIP-7918 – Blob Base Fee Adjustment: Under the current system, blob prices were artificially reduced to as low as 1 wei. The new mechanism provides realistic and stable pricing by tying blob costs to the tier-1 gas price.

Together, these three EIPs pave the way for a historic capacity increase in Ethereum’s L2 data space.

Significant improvements in node infrastructure and DoS resilience are coming into play:

• EIP-7642 – History Expiry Notice: Nodes will now announce which block range they hold, making history data synchronization much faster. Removing bloom filters saves 500GB+ per node synchronization.
• EIP-7825 – Per-transaction gas limit: This provides a significant defense against DoS attacks by preventing a single transaction from filling an entire block. The upper limit is ~16.7M gas.
• EIP-7934 – Block Size Ceiling: Blocks in the RLP format are now limited to 10MB. This prevents attempts to slow down the network by generating excessively large blocks.
• EIP-7935 – 60M Gas Limit Default: Higher gas limit means more transaction volume, higher TPS, and lower density costs.

Fusaka also includes Ethereum’s biggest innovations that touch the end user:

• EIP-7951 – P-256 (secp256r1) Precompile: The signature standard used on iPhone and Android devices has been built into Ethereum, paving the way for next-generation wallets that work with Face ID and similar biometric signatures.
• EIP-7917 – Deterministic Proposer Lookahead: Instant transaction pre-confirmation is now possible on Layer-1 by predetermining the next block producer. This will enable users to experience instant confirmation when sending transactions on Ethereum for the first time.

Fusaka also brings comprehensive improvements to smart contract developers and client developers:

• EIP-7939 – CLZ Opcode: This new opcode, which calculates the number of leading zero bits in a number, provides smaller bytecode, cheaper contract execution, and lower ZK proof costs.
• EIP-7910 – eth_config JSON-RPC: Added a new method to indicate which fork nodes are running on, preventing consensus errors due to misconfiguration.
• EIP-7823 & EIP-7883 – MODEXP Limits and Gas Increase: For MODEXP, one of Ethereum’s most problematic precompiles, both the input size is limited and the gas cost is reduced to realistic levels.

*This is not investment advice.