Ethereum announced that the Fusaka hard fork upgrade is expected to be implemented in the third or fourth quarter of 2025, which is a major update after the Pectra upgrade in May 2025. However, the EOF (EVM Object Format) upgrade originally included in the upgrade has been confirmed to be removed by core developers due to technical complexity and risk controversies. The overall 2025 upgrade roadmap is seen by the community as Ethereum refocusing on scalability and overall performance improvement, lowering the priority of user accessibility and operational optimization in the fork.
Fusaka Upgrade: PeerDAS Performance Expansion
The Fusaka hard fork includes many scalability upgrades, particularly better support for Layer 2 solutions and handling more on-chain activities. The main upgrade is PeerDAS. After the Dencun hard fork, although EIP-4844 (blobs) was enabled to reduce costs, full nodes were still required to store data completely, limiting network scalability.
PeerDAS can reduce node burden through P2P methods, allowing nodes to be responsible for different data to increase transmission efficiency, and can serve as a foundation for subsequent upgrades like Danksharding. It potentially raises the Block gas limit up to 120 million or 150 million, potentially reducing Layer 1 costs. It also includes EIP-7825, EIP-7907, enhancing network anti-congestion and development flexibility, and repairing blob transaction market stability.
EOF Upgrade Controversy and Removal
The originally planned EOF (EVM Object Format) upgrade was also canceled in this announcement. EOF was intended to improve the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) handling of smart contract bytecode, but due to technical complexity, the need for extensive tool chain upgrades, and unclear benefits, it sparked controversy. Core developers ultimately decided to remove it considering complexity, lack of consensus, and avoiding delays, a decision that reflects community concerns, with most major token holders leaning conservative.
Removing EOF and focusing on other improvements is seen by the community as Ethereum's current shift towards a more pragmatic, incremental upgrade strategy, gradually improving through frequent small updates to enhance user experience. Fusaka is a key step after Pectra towards other upgrades, embodying a gradual realization of long-term vision.
Community Gradually Supporting RISC-V?
After the Ethereum Fusaka hard fork update, the potential to raise the gas limit could directly improve user experience and transaction speed. However, abandoning the complex EOF reform also demonstrates the Ethereum community's hesitation about EVM structural reforms. After Vitalik proposed the avant-garde RISC-V revision, the current EVM smart contract format and state classification seem unnecessary, but the specific postponement can be seen as the community's stance supporting RISC-V revision, which still requires further observation.
After related underlying hard fork upgrades like Pectra and Fusaka, controversies will likely eventually return to optimizing Ethereum's EVM execution layer. The question is how to handle the EVM, which is considered a performance bottleneck - whether to expand EOF to optimize EVM execution or to comprehensively shift to RISC-V. Whichever path is chosen will be a comprehensive and massive project. In any case, we will only have the opportunity to see Ethereum's community direction after the Fusaka upgrade.
