Author: Jae, PANews

On December 4th, Ethereum officially activated the Fusaka upgrade. Driven by this positive news, Ethereum spot ETFs saw a net inflow of $140 million yesterday, with none of the nine ETFs experiencing outflows, indicating market optimism regarding Ethereum's fundamentals.

As the Ethereum roadmap continues to evolve, each hard fork is an important piece of the puzzle towards the goal of becoming a "world computer." The Fusaka upgrade, serving as a bridge between Ethereum's "The Verge" and "The Purge" phases, is not merely a routine hard fork, but is also seen as a crucial step in mitigating centralized risks and lowering the hardware barrier for Ethereum. However, behind this promising technological vision lies the challenge of increasing technical complexity.

PeerDAS unlocks scalability limits, further empowering the L2 ecosystem.

Ethereum's Fusaka upgrade marks a crucial next stage in its mainnet development. The core objective of the Fusaka upgrade is the deployment of EIP-7594, also known as PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling). The introduction of PeerDAS aims to fundamentally reshape Ethereum's underlying architecture and data verification mechanisms, significantly improving network scalability, security, and user experience.

Ethereum previously introduced the data container "Blob" through EIP-4844 (Proto-Danksharding) during the Dencun upgrade, successfully reducing L2 (Layer 2) transaction fees by 60% to 90% and significantly improving the user experience of Rollups. However, Proto-Danksharding is only a temporary solution. While it creates low-cost data space, it does not fundamentally increase the mainnet's data capacity limit and cannot meet the long-term needs of large-scale applications.

PeerDAS will change the way the network collects and verifies L2 data, eliminating the requirement for all nodes to store all Blob data. Based on PeerDAS technology, network nodes only need to store one-eighth of the Blob data to verify its availability and integrity through data sampling mechanisms. This improvement in storage efficiency allows the mainnet to significantly expand Blob capacity without increasing the hardware burden on individual nodes.

In theory, PeerDAS's design will unlock up to 8 times the scalability of Rollups. This also marks Ethereum's first step towards full data sharding, further reducing the cost burden of L2 by increasing Blob capacity.

As of now, perhaps due to Ethereum's recent Fusaka upgrade and the current sluggish on-chain activity, there have been no significant changes in the data.

For L2 operators, PeerDAS offers predictable data availability costs. This will encourage the construction of more data-intensive applications, such as more complex DeFi protocols, large gaming platforms, or data storage tools, without the concern of high cost constraints. This architectural optimization will also enhance L2 stickiness, encouraging continued development within the Ethereum ecosystem and further solidifying Ethereum's position as a "global settlement layer."

The Fusaka upgrade may alleviate the risks of geographical centralization while lowering the hardware barrier.

On November 20, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated on Devconnect that if large institutions such as BlackRock continue to increase their ETH holdings, the base layer technology roadmap may be dominated by institutional demand, making it difficult for ordinary users to run nodes and leading to network and geographical centralization issues.

Related reading: Ethereum at a crossroads: The looming quantum threat and the double squeeze on Wall Street capital.

Despite the large number of Ethereum validator nodes, their geographical distribution is highly concentrated, primarily located in a few low-latency regions such as the US East Coast and Europe, where large staking service providers are concentrated. This phenomenon is a natural consequence of profit-seeking behavior constrained by physical limitations. In Ethereum's consensus mechanism, low latency helps validators receive and propagate blocks faster, thereby earning more rewards and achieving higher overall profitability.

Currently, running an Ethereum validator node still presents a high hardware barrier, requiring hundreds of gigabytes of hard drive space and a long synchronization time. While these stringent technical and operational requirements are easily manageable for large staking service providers, they pose a significant obstacle for independent stakers. With the rapid growth of block data, this problem has become increasingly apparent, and staking rights are concentrating towards institutions and professional entities.

The Verkle Trees introduced in the Fusaka upgrade plan may mitigate this risk. Verkle Trees is a new data structure algorithm designed to replace the current Merkle Patricia Trees, optimizing on-chain data storage and node size.

The breakthrough of this technology lies in its ability to enable stateless validator clients. This means that nodes do not need to store all historical blockchain state data locally when validating transactions. Vitalik Buterin emphasized that Verkle Trees will reduce the hard drive space required to run staking nodes to "near zero" and achieve "near-instantaneous" synchronization time.

The lower hardware barrier brought about by Verkle Trees is a key technological measure to combat the risks of geographical centralization. As the user experience for independent stakers is significantly improved, they will join or return in large numbers, thereby counterbalancing the centralization trend of large staking pools.

Ethereum's empowerment of individual participants is not only a technological optimization, but also a powerful defense of the principle of decentralization.

The continued accumulation of technical debt will become a long-term challenge.

Ethereum Foundation researcher Ansgar Dietrichs describes PeerDAS as a "fundamental change" to the nature of L1. It's not just a simple software patch; it involves the underlying logic of the consensus layer handling data availability proofs. This type of infrastructure restructuring requires synchronized updates and coordination across all clients in the Ethereum ecosystem, significantly increasing overall technical complexity.

For example, Verkle Trees relies on Vector Commitment, a complex cryptographic construct. When such cryptographic structures are integrated into smart contracts, even the slightest error can lead to serious protocol-level vulnerabilities.

In reality, every major upgrade to Ethereum involves a profound redesign of its underlying architecture. This cumulative effect of technological complexity has led to a significant accumulation of technical debt. This increases the difficulty for developers to maintain client-side code and implement security audits, and also raises potential systemic risks.

As network complexity increases dramatically, Ethereum's development focus is shifting from early performance optimization to stability, decentralization, and economic balance. Maintaining this increasingly complex protocol while adhering to decentralization principles will be a long-term challenge for Ethereum.

The Fusaka upgrade is an essential step for Ethereum towards its "endgame." It attempts to reshape the decentralized nature of Ethereum by lowering the hardware barrier and pave the way for the continued prosperity of L2, which also represents Ethereum's evolution from pursuing performance to pursuing sustainability.

However, ensuring security within an increasingly complex underlying architecture will be a challenging problem that developers must solve. For the community and investors, the Fusaka upgrade is not only a technological iteration but also a reaffirmation of Ethereum's long-term value.