Interpreting Ethereum’s Fusaka Upgrade: Behind Vitalik’s Praise, Is This the Real Takeoff Point for a Global Settlement Layer?

When Vitalik Buterin posted on X, saying, “Warm congratulations to the researchers and developers who have pushed this achievement forward for years,” it also signaled the success of Ethereum’s Fusaka upgrade. If you still haven’t carefully studied what Fusaka includes, you can still roughly feel from Vitalik Buterin’s tweet that this round of Ethereum’s scaling roadmap should be critical — perhaps Ethereum is entering a stage that is more decisive than at any time before.

Back to Fusaka itself, in a summarizing sentence: Fusaka is not an ordinary upgrade. It is completely different from past upgrades that patched vulnerabilities, optimized costs, or fine-tuned user experience. This is a truly structural network upgrade — it rewrites Ethereum’s “data availability logic”, and for the first time, the entire ecosystem is genuinely approaching the so-called “infinitely scalable L2 world.”

If Dencun was “making data cheaper,” and Pectra was “making L1 stable,” then Fusaka is telling the market: we are not only going to scale, but we are going to push scaling capacity to a theoretical limit without sacrificing security.

That is exactly why Vitalik is excited. And that is also why global markets, developers, and institutions are closely watching where this upgrade goes.

Why Is Vitalik Praising It So Much? Ethereum Has Finally Reached a “Key Node” in Its Scaling Roadmap

In the crypto industry, founders rarely comment on every upgrade, because after Ethereum’s upgrade frequency increased, from a technical perspective, “upgrades became the norm.” But Fusaka is different — its significance is enough for Vitalik to publicly express excitement.

There are three core reasons:

1. PeerDAS Is Ethereum’s First Truly Meaningful “Capacity Multiplier”

After Dencun, Ethereum reduced L2 data costs through Blobs, but the data volume was still constrained, because each node still needed to download the full Blob data. This means:

bandwidth becomes the bottleneck
network capacity cannot scale linearly with ecosystem expansion
Ethereum is still seen as a “medium-performance settlement chain”

And PeerDAS completely changes this: each node only needs to verify shard data, and does not need to download the full data.

In other words, Ethereum is truly functioning like a modular system for the first time: the entire network jointly Undertake data verification, each node carries a small part — security is not reduced, but capacity increases.

This means Ethereum breaks the single-point bottleneck for the first time: not only scaling, but “scaling without downgrade” (no sacrifice of decentralization). This is a target that almost all L1 upgrades over the past decade struggled to achieve.

2. A Theoretical 8x Capacity Increase Means the L2 Fee Curve Will See a New Inflection Point

Essentially, L2 fees come from two parts: execution fees within the L2 chain, and the Blob Fee paid to Ethereum mainnet for data submission. Now PeerDAS increases data capacity, making Blob space more abundant, which most directly impacts L2 fees: L2 submission costs decline further, and the most expensive “data access” portion is decompressed, pushing Ethereum’s L2 cost model toward a new equilibrium point.

In outcome terms, L2 transaction fees will move even closer to zero, and lower fees mean:

better user experience
higher L2 project activity
many on-chain games and DeFi modules become feasible
Ethereum’s settlement-layer position becomes even more solid

The purpose is clear. Isn’t this result exactly the most important target of Ethereum’s roadmap all along?

3. Ethereum Officially Enters the “Two Hard Forks Per Year Era”

For a system the size of Ethereum, two hard forks per year is extremely incredible. Compared with BTC averaging once every 4 years and Solana having 2–3 minor updates, ETH now having two major forks per year can be said to be the industry’s highest speed for continuously iterating underlying infrastructure.

This represents:

faster upgrade cadence
technical progress no longer waits for a “big version”
community governance and developer collaboration become more efficient
a frequently updated infrastructure becomes better soil for the ecosystem

The True Core of Fusaka: PeerDAS Redefines “Data Availability”

If we reduce this upgrade to its essence, it’s one sentence: PeerDAS lets Ethereum increase data capacity without increasing hardware requirements — and it is the industry’s first time achieving Ethereum-level decentralized scaling.

We reveal the essence of PeerDAS from four angles:

1. Splitting All Data into Small Pieces, Distributing Verification Pressure

The old data model:

every node must download all data
the more nodes, the lower the performance

The PeerDAS model:

data is cut into many small pieces
each node only verifies a small set of fragments
the whole network collaborates to complete overall verification

This is extremely similar to BitTorrent’s peer-to-peer download logic, allowing Ethereum to achieve true distributed data verification for the first time.

2. Ethereum Does Not Need to Sacrifice Security Parameters to Scale

Traditional scaling models:

increase block size, but decentralization declines
raise node hardware requirements, but security declines
multi-chain models, but consistency is sacrificed
lower the security threshold, but risk rises

PeerDAS’s breakthrough is: it sacrifices nothing.

scale without changing block size
scale without increasing node costs
scale without changing the consensus mechanism
scale while maintaining the highest decentralization

This is exactly the “correct scaling path” that Vitalik has emphasized for years.

3. Redefining Data Availability, Breaking the Ceiling for L2 Development

L2’s current bottleneck is entirely “data availability cost.” The higher the fee, the harder L2 is to scale; PeerDAS turns data availability from a “bottleneck” into a “scalable resource.”

It will bring huge ecosystem changes:

OP, ARB, ZKSync data costs decline
more ZK Rollups emerge and flourish
on-chain games, social, and public chain projects all move toward L2
PeerDAS will be the starting point of L2 explosion

4. PeerDAS Is the Foundation of Future Scaling, Not the Endpoint

PeerDAS is the beginning of “large-scale scaling,” not the end. Two key future directions:

Danksharding (in phased progress)
Full Data Sampling

By then, Ethereum’s data capacity will not just be 8x — it will grow by multiples.

From a Full-Market Perspective, the Most Direct Benefits of This Upgrade Come From L2

1. L2 Fees Will Enter a “Long-Term Downtrend”

Current L2 fees of $0.02–$0.1 may drop to the $0.003–$0.008 range. The impact of fee reduction is huge:

on-chain games can run more smoothly
large-scale social networks become more feasible
AI + blockchain applications can be deployed
user participation no longer has cost pain

This is the first step toward “using blockchain with no threshold.”

2. L2 Competition Shifts from “Cheap” to “Experience”

What did L2 competition used to be?

who is cheaper
whose Blob fee is lower
whose compression algorithm is better

After Fusaka, price differences shrink, and competition shifts to:

wallet experience
ecosystem depth
local liquidity advantages
developer toolchains
cross-chain abstraction level
customization ability in AI / gaming / social fields

Layer2 will move from a “price war” to an “ecosystem war.”

3. L2 Will Enter a Large-Scale Reshuffle Phase

Fee decline → activity rises → capital flows in → L2 premium expands, but the upgrade will also puncture some bubbles:

L2s relying only on “low fees” as their unique selling point will fall behind
L2s without self-developed tech will be marginalized
L2s lacking ecosystem will decline rapidly

The final pattern may become:

Ethereum mainnet as the settlement layer
3 to 5 major L2s forming super ecosystems
countless vertical application chains becoming ecosystem subchains

Fusaka’s Potential Risks: It Is Not a Perfect Upgrade

Every upgrade carries risk, and Fusaka is no exception. We summarize three risks that the market is highly focused on (only summarizing market viewpoints):

1. PeerDAS Implementation Complexity Is High

Data sampling, distributed verification, node collaboration… if any module has a bug, it could lead to:

temporary block missing
data fragment loss
node forks
increased network latency

Although testnets have run for months, mainnet is always more complex.

2. L1 Fees Won’t Drop, and User Understanding Cost May Rise

Some users may mistakenly think: “Ethereum upgraded, so Gas should drop, right?” But L1 fees were never supposed to decline. The industry needs to re-educate users:

what gets cheaper is L2
L1 is always the settlement layer, value layer, clearing layer
L1 is expensive so that L2 can be cheaper

Understanding this is a threshold for users.

3. Bandwidth Requirements for Nodes May Continue Rising in the Future

Although PeerDAS reduces node pressure, as:

Blob limits increase
data volume doubles
Danksharding phases advance
node bandwidth will still grow eventually, which may cause small nodes to exit

This is a challenge Ethereum must solve in the future.

Conclusion: Fusaka Is a Turning Point in Ethereum’s 10-Year Roadmap

If we divide Ethereum’s development from 2015–2025 into three eras:

Stage 1: The Programmable Money Era (2015–2020)
Ethereum proved smart contracts were feasible and ignited ICOs and DeFi.

Stage 2: From PoW to PoS and the Modular Era (2020–2024)
Ethereum completed the Merge, introduced the Rollup ecosystem, and massively lowered L2 costs with Dencun as the starting point.

Stage 3: The Scaling and Settlement Layer Era (2025–2030)
Fusaka is the beginning of this era.

It opens Ethereum’s:

ultra-large-scale scaling capacity
decentralized data availability
dominance of modular architecture
near-zero L2 fee user experience
global financial-grade settlement capability

That is why Vitalik publicly congratulated it — because this is not only a victory for developers, but also a decisive advancement of Ethereum’s roadmap. The next era belongs to a stronger, more open, more scalable Ethereum — and it also belongs to a new growth cycle for the entire crypto industry.