Key Takeaways
What’s next for the Fusaka upgrade?
The team will monitor for any fixes and ship Fusaka to Sepolia and Hoodi testnets.
How did the ETH market react?
ETH recorded relatively higher speculative interest after the Fusaka upgrade.
Ethereum [ETH] is pushing for more speed, efficiency, and bandwidth, especially ahead of tokenization booms and the internet capital markets narrative.
After successfully shipping the Pectra upgrade in May, the Fusaka upgrade is smoothly progressing per the December timeline.
On the 1st of October, the Ethereum protocol team announced that the Fusaka upgrade successfully passed the Holesky testnet.
Source: X
Fusaka upgrade — What’s next and why it matters?
Fusaka seeks to scale Ethereum’s speed and bandwidth by allowing lighter nodes and cheaper Layer 2 transactions.
For lighter nodes, they’ll be able to ‘sample’ data instead of downloading the entire blob data. This reduces storage needs and expands bandwidth.
This would allow L2s to push more transactions at lower costs. In addition, Fusaka update increases gas limits by more than 3x from the current 45 million to 150 million, allowing transactions per block.
So, what’s the need for the latest scaling effort? Well, Ethereum ranks 18th in terms of throughput and speed, according to Chainspect.
Solana [SOL] is the second-fastest chain, with low latency that could be ideal for handling internet capital markets.
To stay competitive, Ethereum must rival Solana in this aspect. And the ongoing scaling efforts will help close the gap.
The next stage for Fusaka will be Sepolia and Hoodi testnets before finally hitting the mainnet in early December if it doesn’t run into any issues.
ETH rallies 5% after network upgrade
On the price charts, ETH bounced 5% after the Fusaka upgrade. But most of the upswing was linked to Bitcoin’s [BTC] jump to $119K.
Clearing the trendline resistance and short-term supply above $4.5K could reinforce the bulls’ market edge.
Source: ETH/USDT, TradingView
That being said, ETH had a relatively higher speculative interest than SOL or BTC in the past 24 hours. ETH’s Open Interest (OI) surged by 4% while SOL increased by 2% and BTC by 3%.
This could fuel ETH’s outperformance amid strong demand in the Futures market.