Ethereum Scaling Comparison: Pectra versus Fusaka

Pectra included 20 EIPs. Developers faced delays because they added unimplemented EIPs late. Pectra focused on account abstraction and validator UX. EIP-7702 allows users to pay gas fees in stablecoins like USDC or DAI. This reduces volatility risks. It also allows dApps to subsidize gas fees through sponsored transactions. This enables gasless transactions. It enables batch operations to execute multiple actions like approvals and token swaps in one transaction. This reduces friction for mainstream adoption. EIP-7702 allows users to temporarily delegate to contract code. This improves interaction with smart contracts. EIP-7251 increases the maximum effective balance for validators from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH. This change reduces validator proliferation and helps improve attestation speeds by 30%. This consolidation reduces networking pressure. Existing validators with a maximum effective balance of 32 ETH can consolidate their stake. Validators holding more than 32 ETH benefit from compounding rewards. Pectra arrived in May 2025. Fusaka follows Pectra. It focuses on PeerDAS and the EVM Object Format. Developers prioritize these two EIPs for Fusaka Devnet 1 to avoid the delays that Pectra faced.

Pectra increased the per-block blob target from three to six. Fusaka uses BPO forks to increase capacity further. BPO1 increases the target to 10 and the maximum to 15. This happens on December 9, 2025. BPO2 increases the target to 14 and the maximum to 21. This happens on January 7, 2026. PeerDAS uses erasure coding to allow nodes to sample portions of blob data. This maintains cryptographic guarantees that full data is available. PeerDAS reduces the data load for nodes and helps lower L2 transaction fees. PeerDAS provides an 8x increase in data space. L2s use builder APIs to publish blobs rather than relying on the public mempool. The implementation of PeerDAS allows nodes to verify data availability through sampling instead of downloading entire blobs, which enables the network to scale throughput and maintains security guarantees for all participants throughout the BPO1 and BPO2 stages.

These values show the progressive scaling of blob capacity.

Pectra improved the user experience. Fusaka improves L1 performance. EIP-7935 raises the default gas limit to 60M. Core developers believe Ethereum L1 can safely scale to this limit. This allows more L1 execution capacity. EIP-7825 implements a transaction gas limit cap of 16,777,216 gas. This prevents a single transaction from consuming excessive block gas and protects against DoS attacks. This lays the groundwork for parallel transaction processing in the EVM. EIP-7642 removes pre-merge fields and the receipt Bloom from the networking protocol. This reduces sync bandwidth requirements. It also adds an explicit history serving window for nodes to advertise. It simplifies the codebase by removing legacy components. PeerDAS creates a three-tiered system of supernodes, validating nodes, and full nodes. Supernodes require higher storage and bandwidth. Some developers fear this concentrates the data layer among large players. You probably know that high bandwidth requirements create tension for smaller operators. Will the supernode requirement eventually drive away smaller node operators? Fusaka Devnet-3 experienced five days of non-finality because of syncing issues.

Fusaka includes EIP-7939, which adds the CLZ opcode for gas-efficient bit-counting. This provides a way to perform fundamental bit-counting operations. This helps with compression algorithms, mathematical operations, and post-quantum signature schemes. It also reduces ZK proving costs. EIP-7951 adds native support for the secp256r1 elliptic curve. This enables direct integration with Apple Secure Enclave, Android Keystore, FIDO2, and WebAuthn devices. This reduces friction for mainstream blockchain adoption. EIP-7883 and EIP-7823 work together to optimize the ModExp precompile. EIP-7883 increases gas costs to reflect computational complexity. It triples general cost calculations and raises minimal gas costs. EIP-7823 sets upper bounds for ModExp operations. It uses a 1028-byte limit per operand to support 8K RSA keys. These changes ensure resource-intensive cryptographic operations are priced correctly and support future block gas limit increases. Fusaka surpasses Pectra in raw throughput capacity.