Ethereum’s Fusaka fork explained for dummies: What the hell is PeerDAS?

How Ethereum’s Fusaka upgrade scales the L1 and the L2s — explained for ordinary crypto fans without the usual baffling technical jargon.

After three successful trials on the Holesky, Sepolia and Hoodi testnet, Ethereums Fusaka hardfork will go live on mainnet on December 3.

Its the most eagerly anticipated upgrade to Ethereum since the last one, Pectra although Fusaka will have a much more significant impact, enabling rollups to scale in the space of a month up to 1,000 transactions per second (TPS) and to 100,000 TPS over time.

Its actually two separate hard forks: the Fulu upgrade to the consensus layer (the part of a blockchain where validators in the network agree on what happened) and the Osaka upgrade to the execution layer (the part that actually processes transactions).

In the future, the consensus layer will be rebuilt as Lean Consensus (formerly known as Beam Chain but renamed after a trademark dispute) and hardened for security and decentralization with finality in seconds.

As part of the Lean Ethereum roadmap, validators on the execution layer will switch from reexecuting transactions to simply verifying tiny zero-knowledge proofs, enabling the L1 to scale to 10,000 TPS.

But thats the long-term vision, expected to be completed within five years. Lets take a look in detail at what improvements will occur in a little over two weeks time with Fusaka.

Peer data availability sampling (PeerDAS) is a clever method to enable Ethereum to handle a lot more data, which enables L2s and rollups to scale up throughput.

The reason blockchains are a source of truth is because every computer in the network repeats the work of all the other computers in the network and agrees on the result, which is then recorded immutably.

This is, of course, horribly inefficient and means the blockchains speed is limited by the slowest computers, with the worst download speeds, on the network.

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