Amid its evolutionary journey, the Ethereum protocol is set to undergo another major upgrade dubbed Pectra in the first quarter of 2025. For a long time, developers have worked on this upgrade, adding and removing EIPs amid functionality review. However, many wondered what comes next after the coming Pectra upgrade. Here is where the Fusaka upgrade comes in.
For various reasons, developers had to drop some improvements initially designated for inclusion in Pectra upgrade. Some of these EIPs will now be a part of the Fusaka upgrade. It is worth noting that the anticipated enhancements will help Ethereum and its associated Layer-2 solutions sustain their Decentralized Finance (DeFi) growth traction.
According to Galaxy Research Vice President and core Ethereum developer Christine Kim, stakeholders have not yet completed the scope of Fusaka as of now. This makes estimating the timeline for its launch fairly harder.
However, she noted that developers will focus on the original 12 code changes in the original Pectra EIPs for Fusaka. These changes are subdivided into EOF Code changes and PeerDAS. When Pectra goes live, developers may now focus on what changes need to go live with Fusaka and which might have to drop.
One of the major Ethereum Improvement Proposals billed for Fusaka is EIP 7549. This EIP will help improve the main chain's ability to scale through Layer-2 rollups. According to a Galaxy Research note from October, this improvement will "implement a new networking protocol to increase blob capacity while keeping the computational load on nodes unchanged."
Other major EIPs that will accompany Fusaka include EIP 3670 for "Code Validation" and EIP4750 to enhance "Functions."
Notably, Fusaka may contain more than the 12 EIPs, a decision core devs will make when the upgrade is fully in focus.
Amid the growing competition in the broader DeFi ecosystem, Ethereum L2s remains one of the biggest beneficiaries. However, Ethereum price might also need this upgrade as key fundamental updates might be the missing ingredient to trigger a new run in the the coin's spot valuation.
Notably, ETH price suffered a major drawdown that pushed it below $4,000 mark over the past few weeks.
As of writing, ETH price was changing hands for $3,479.25, up 1.09% in 24 hours. With more upgrade comes enhanced functionalities which can drive adoption within the ETH ecosystem. This trend may help fuel increased demand for ETH, pushing its price to a new high.
Beyond Pectra and Fusaka, Ethereum developers are also eyeing Beam Chain consensus layer upgrade. Lately, there has been silence regarding this proposition.