Ethereum activated its Fusaka upgrade on mainnet on Wednesday, bringing the network’s second major upgrade this year and introducing changes to data availability and block capacity that developers said would define its next phase of scaling.

The upgrade was activated at block height 18,200,000 in late afternoon, following test deployments across the Holesky, Sepolia, and Hoodi test networks throughout October. Final readiness checks were completed across client teams earlier this week.

Ethereum’s price has sprung to life, having traded between roughly $3,150 and $3,210 in the hours after Fusaka went live, climbing steadily through Wednesday evening and past midnight early Thursday, according to CoinGecko data. It’s currently up 4.3% on the day to $3,200.

Volume swelled from $28.2 billion to $32 billion at the time of writing, over a roughly six-hour period. The price action has been attributed to “strong accumulation from shark wallets” holding 1,000-10,000 ETH, according to early analysis from Santiment.

Fusaka introduces PeerDAS, a data availability sampling system that allows each node to store only a fraction of the posted blob data, rather than every byte. It reduces bandwidth and storage requirements and gives the network room to expand blob throughput by roughly eight times compared to previous limits.

“PeerDAS in Fusaka is important because it literally represents sharding,” Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin tweeted on the occasion. “Sharding has been a dream for Ethereum since 2015, and data availability sampling since 2017, and now we have it.”

The upgrade also enables Blob-Parameter-Only (BPO) configuration changes, which let clients raise blob capacity without a full hard fork, according to the Ethereum network’s official roadmap.

Alongside the base fee changes for blobs, the upgrade prevents blob fees from collapsing when gas prices rise, which pays for running transactions and smart contract logic on Ethereum.

Fusaka also adds tweaks that make transactions safer and easier to run, which developers said could help reduce costs and support decentralization as network activity grows.

Fusaka appears to be an “infrastructure-heavy update,”  Shiv Shankar, CEO of decentralized zero-knowledge compute marketplace Boundless, said in a statement shared with Decrypt.

The changes included are “long-standing requests” and “meaningfully expand capacity without disrupting the system’s fundamentals,” he added.

Those improvements would likely “influence how value flows through Ethereum’s base layer, and the most direct beneficiary is Layer 1 block space,” a Sygnum Bank study claims.

“When the network becomes more efficient in handling execution or processing larger volumes of data, the effects will likely lead to a gradual increase in fee burn and validator rewards,” the bank wrote. “These will not be visible immediately, but they will slowly accumulate as network activity rises.”

Fusaka would “alter the competitive positioning across rollups” and help “define the downstream effects of the next cycle,” Guillame Poncin, chief technology officer at blockchain developer platform Alchemy, said in a statement shared with Decrypt.

Rollups are layer-2 scaling solutions for Ethereum that execute transactions off-chain but post transaction data to the main network.

The upgrade “represents a structural improvement to Ethereum’s settlement architecture,” Edwin Mata, co-founder and CEO of tokenization platform Brickken, said in a statement shared with Decrypt.

“By reducing the data load that rollups and validators must process, the network becomes more predictable in both performance and cost,” Mata explained. “That predictability is what regulated institutions look for when assessing whether a public chain can support issuance and post-trade activity at scale.”

Fusaka effectively “lowers the operational threshold for node participation” in such a way that it could widen the validator base and reduce concentration risk, Mata added.

“Capital markets depend on resilient networks with no single point of failure, and improved decentralization directly contributes to that requirement,” he said.