Ethereum is picking up speed again, not on the price chart it is currently struggling with, but in the quiet machine underneath.
Two breakthroughs in protocol layers and cryptography are occurring in parallel, redefining how fast and lightweight the world’s most used blockchain is.
Together, they envision a future where everyone, from institutions to small verifiers, can participate in the network in real time, without the need for supercomputers or deep pockets.
Fusaka upgrade
The first significant milestone on that path is Fusaka, the upcoming hard fork of Ethereum, tentatively expected in December.
The planned upgrade combines improvements to Ethereum’s execution and consensus layers into one coordinated release.
Unlike Dencun, which introduced “blobs” to help scale up rollups, Fusaka is not chasing raw throughput.
Instead, its role is more nuanced and focused on making networks lighter, cheaper, and more efficient.
Fusaka is implementing 12 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) aimed at streamlining validator workloads and improving the way rollups post data.
The featured EIP-7594 or PeerDAS allows validators to check the availability of rollup data by sampling a portion of it rather than downloading it completely.
Although this does not directly increase TPS, it changes the efficiency with which Ethereum processes data. More rollup information can now fit per block without increasing node requirements.
Developers expect this upgrade to reduce the cost of rollup transactions and make it easier for small businesses to run validators.
Notably, the gas limit is also increased from 45 million to 60 million, which is a 33% increase and gives Layer 2 more headroom to expose compressed transaction data.
Meanwhile, deployment has already begun. Fusaka passed initial tests with Holesky and Sepolia and will take a final test on the Hoody testnet later this month.
real-time proof
While Fusaka is laying the foundations, the real spectacle is happening at the experimental site.
On October 15, Ethereum scaling company Brevis announced Pico Prism, a new zero-knowledge Ethereum virtual machine (zkEVM) that can generate cryptographic proofs almost as fast as the network creates blocks.
In testing, the system achieved 99.9% real-time proof and generated a complete block proof in less than 12 seconds.
Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake noted that this represents a jump from performance in May, when the SP1 Hypercube setup was only able to prove 94% of blocks within the same window.
According to him, this improvement reduces average proof latency to 6.9 seconds, meaning block validation can keep pace with block production. In particular, this is a prerequisite for sub-second settlements, which is Ethereum’s long-term goal.
Drake further stated that this development, and the impending Fusaka upgrade, will make on-premises demonstrations viable for the first time.
he said:
“By the end of the year, several teams will have verified every L1 EVM block on a 16 GPU cluster, and the total power consumption will be less than 10 kW. The 10 kW goal, about the same as Tesla’s home chargers, is important for on-premises verification in garages and offices, and eliminates reliance on cloud verification.”
Scalability roadmap
Drake believes these developments fit into his long-term prediction of “Gigagas L1, Teragas L2.”
In this scenario, Ethereum’s throughput at the base layer for high-value activities such as payments and trading increases to 10,000 transactions per second (TPS).
Meanwhile, the network can scale to 10 million TPS across the Layer 2 network to handle everything else. Drake said:
“L1 throughput has increased 100 times since its inception 10 years ago, from 20 kilogas/second to 2 megagas/second. With zkEVM, it increases 100 times again in half the time.”
Increased technical debt
Ethereum’s journey toward faster, cheaper transactions comes with the unsettling problem of accumulating technical debt.
Federico Carone, an Ethereum developer known as a Fede intern, warns that many of the network’s core development tools, particularly the Solidity programming language, are losing momentum.
Solidity is the foundation of the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem. DeFiLlama says it is responsible for over 86% of the smart contract language used in DeFi protocols on over $200 billion blockchain networks.
His concerns echo those of Paradigm CTO Georgios Konstantopoulos, who previously said Solidity’s ecosystem was in a “troubled state.”
However, Carone believes the issue is both technical and economic for blockchain networks.
He argued that maintaining complex infrastructure requires time, continuity, and deep expertise, which cannot be acquired overnight.
Additionally, Carone pointed out that Ethereum’s planned increase in gas limits under the Fusaka upgrade poses another risk.
Carone cautioned that many execution clients have not seen a significant performance improvement and may struggle to process larger blocks.
Considering all these issues, he concluded:
“Ethereum’s technical debt continues to grow, not only because of the continued and necessary evolution of the protocol, but also because of the stagnation of large dependencies and repositories. The ecosystem continues to expand, securing billions of dollars in assets, but some of its foundations are eroding.”
(Tag translation) Ethereum
