The next large Ethereum upgrade is coming: what will change?

Ethereum (ETH) developers have punctured a provisional date for the next major upgrade of the network. The hard fork called Fusaka is planned for November and must make Ethereum more efficient and scalable. The first public test network is at the end of September, followed by a second in October.

Fusaka follows pectra upgrade

But is that planning realistic? According to the developers involved, the timetable is ambitious, especially because the upgrade for the DevConnect conference in Buenos Aires must be rolled out.

The Fusaka upgrade comes six months after the previous hard fork, Pectra. Pectra made it easier to use wallets and made it possible to stop validators. In the new upgrade, eleven Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) are included, including EIP-7825. He must make the network more resilient against attacks and at the same time improve scalability.

Ethereum strives for lower transaction costs

A striking change is that EIP-7907 has been taken out of the schedule. That proposal would double the limit for the size of smart contracts and introduce new gas meter, which would improve the scalability of Ethereum because better insight into gas consumption leads to more efficient network management. Developers chose not to take this with you for the time being, to speed up the test process.

In addition, there is talk about increasing gas limit to 150 million. This increase should help to reduce transaction costs and increase the processing capacity of the network. The gas limit determines how much work a block on Ethereum may process maximum. By screwing up that limit, more transactions can be handled at the same time. This causes less crowds on the network, which means that users have to pay less to end up in a block with their transactions.

Glamsterdam upgrade planned for 2026

The next major upgrade after Fusaka, called Glamsterdam, is planned for 2026 for the time being. On 1 August it becomes clear which features end up in that hard fork. A proposal that is already on the table comes from Core developer Barnabé Monnot. He wants to halve the block time from 12 to 6 seconds. According to him, that would be a significant improvement for Defi applications and user experience.

Yet there are doubts about the pace. In a post on X, Ethereum protocol supportor Nixo indicated that it will be a challenge to launch Fusaka this year. “If we want to ship before Devconect, then our planning must be tight,” he wrote.