- Ethereum, the second largest blockchain and cryptocurrency by market cap, is set to go live with two major upgrades in November 2025 and early 2026.
- These upgrades have two things in common: a proposed higher gas limit for transactions and reduced block time for faster and more efficient transactions on Ethereum.
- The Ethereum community is pushing for more upgrades, with Fusaka set to be released six months after the recent Pectra hard fork. Pectra which introduced account abstraction, increased the validator staking limit, and improved Layer-2 network efficiency.
What is the Fusaka Upgrade and When Will It Go Live on Ethereum?
The Ethereum network continues with its improvements after its last major update, Pectra, on May 7. This upgrade saw 11 enhancements that focused on improving the network’s speed, cost efficiency, and overall usability. One of the key improvements was to increase the validator stake limit. It now allows up to 2048 ETH compared to 32 ETH before.
But how is the Fusaka upgrade different from the Pectra one? Well, its primary focus is on deeper scalability through fundamental changes to Ethereum’s data handling and state management, as well as further improvements to the network’s resilience.
And the network is not stopping there; to further enhance Ethereum’s growth, it has also planned the Glamsterdam hard fork, which is scheduled to go live in 2026. Despite these upcoming upgrades, the Ethereum developer community have been asking for faster upgrades.
Fusaka is the next major hard fork, its main focus will be on deepening Ethereum’s scalability. ethPandaOps, a community focused on enhancing the Ethereum network, said that the Fusaka hard fork will launch its next devnet on July 23, 2025. This upgrade too, would include 11 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs). These include fundamental changes to Ethereum’s data handling and state management, as well as further improvements to the network’s resilience. One of the proposals includes EIP-7825, which will implement a protocol-level cap on the maximum gas used for a transaction to go through.
Current transactions taking place on the chain are taking too much gas which also leads to malicious attacks and puts a burden on the overall validator network, making Ethereum slow and less profitable for network participants.
Ethereum’s lead developers have proposed to boost the network’s overall transaction throughput by lifting the block gas limit to 150 million.
In April, Tim Beiko, who is Ethereum’s core developer, said that the EVM Object Format (EOF) upgrade would not be included in the upcoming Fusaka hard fork. Including this has been a point of debate among developers for a long time.
What is the EVM Object Format?
The EOF is the core software engine that executes all the smart contracts and transactions on Ethereum. Smart contracts are self-executing contracts that use the if else statement where if a statement is true then the transaction goes through on the Ethereum network.
A smart contract function when called and executed gets compiled into a bytecode. The EOF an upgrade that would change this by introducing a more organized, standardized, and versioned structure for this bytecode. However, as the process suggests, implementing this on Ethereum is a big deal as such an upgrade can take up a lot of time, resources and can be very complicated to carry out.
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Upgrades In Line After Fusaka
The Fusaka hard fork is on track for a final launch in early November, following the release of two public testnets scheduled for September and October. The next major update to go live on Ethereum is Glamsterdam. The specific upgrades that will be included in Glamsterdam are set to be confirmed on August 1, 2025, during the next AllCoreDevs – Execution meeting.
In a recent post on X, Vitalik Buterin confirmed that exactly 50% of the network had voted in favour of increasing the gas limit to 45 million.
Wrapping Up
Ethereum has been criticized for high gas prices and extremely poor scalability. The chain has been more dependent on layer 2 scaling solutions. A large number of users have already moved away to layer 2 solutions or Ethereum killer chains like Solana.
With Ethereum’s next move to optimize gas limit and block height in the upcoming upgrades, the chain could potentially get a higher number of users. Besides user acquisition, Ethereum’s price could also see a major uptick in 2025 and 2026. ETH is trading at 3,770.53 USD at the time of writing.
