Leading smart contract platform Ethereum (ETH) is poised to undergo the Fusaka upgrade, a keenly anticipated milestone for the protocol that will bring a range of improvements to the network. The upgrade is scheduled to go live on December 3, 2025.

What is Ethereum Fusaka upgrade?

A little on the etymology behind the term ‘Fusaka.’ It combines two words, Fulu star – Ethereum’s consensus layer version – and Osaka, the name of Ethereum’s execution layer. The Fusaka upgrade follows Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade, which went live in May 2025.

While the Fusaka upgrade brings several improvements to Ethereum, there are three major technological advancements that the majority of the community will closely follow: Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS), Verkle Trees, and P-256.

PeerDAS to significantly improve Ethereum scalability

Dubbed the headliner of the Fusaka upgrade by the Ethereum Foundation, PeerDAS aims to make Ethereum more scalable and efficient in supporting faster, cheaper rollups like Arbitrum, Optimism, and other Ethereum-focused Layer 2 solutions.

While some people claim that PeerDAS – or the Fusaka upgrade at large – will increase Ethereum’s transaction speed from its current 30 transactions per second (tps) to 100,000 tps, that claim is not entirely true. Rather, the 100,000 tps claim is the estimated aggregate tps across all L2s, not just the Ethereum base layer.

PeerDAS will leverage data availability sampling to help Ethereum achieve this feat. This means that instead of checking all of the blob data, each Ethereum node will only check a subset of the blob data. As a result, rollups will be able to post a higher number of transactions per block, significantly increasing Ethereum’s scalability.

Verkle Trees – enhancing node efficiency

Verkle Trees will replace the old Merkle Tree state storage structure by enabling stateless clients that will conduct block verification without storing all state data. Ultimately, Verkle trees will reduce node sync times and storage needs.

While both PeerDAS and Verkle Trees are geared toward making Ethereum more efficient and scalable, users might sometimes use these terms interchangeably. It’s important to know the major differences between the two for better understanding.

An easy example to understand the difference between PeerDAS and Verkle Trees is to see them in a city navigation context. PeerDAS will function as new, wide highways that will help more cars (Ethereum rollup transactions) to run simultaneously.

Meanwhile, Verkle Trees essentially make all Ethereum states, including wallet balances, contracts, and storage, smaller and faster to verify. In a city navigation context, one can think of Verkle Trees as the process of redesigning the map of the entire city to find any address instantly with less storage.

P-256 will pave the way for Ethereum’s mass adoption

Another major advancement for the Ethereum ecosystem that is a part of the Fusaka upgrade relates to the implementation of P-256, an elliptic curve used for security and sign-in purposes.

Support for P-256 will enable Ethereum-based decentralized applications and wallets to use biometric signatures in an efficient way, making it easier for users to interact with the Ethereum ecosystem, and integrate seamlessly with iPhones, Android smartphones, and hardware wallets.

How will the Ethereum price react to Fusaka upgrade?

As with any protocol upgrade, the focus tends to be on the project’s native token. Similarly, the Fusaka upgrade has got the entire Ethereum ecosystem excited, not just the developer community, but also ETH traders and investors.

Speculations are already rife about potential ETH price action on the run up to the Fusaka upgrade and following the successful rollout of the upgrade. Seasoned crypto analyst Ash Crypto remarked that with the Fusaka upgrade, Ethereum is entering its “performance era.”

No one is talking about this But the $ETH FUSAKA upgrade on Dec 3 could be the next leg up catalyst

Ethereum is entering its “Performance Era.”

More Transaction Per Seconds ➜ Lower Fees ➜ Higher Throughput ➜ More Users ➜ Higher Demand

Whales are buying billions worth of… pic.twitter.com/n7Ryr2CbOM

— Ash Crypto (@AshCrypto) November 12, 2025

Ash Crypto highlighted ETH’s price action during the 2020-2021 bull market, when ETH climbed from a bottom of $86 in March 2020, to a new high of $4,815 in November 2021. The analyst added that if ETH stays above $5,000, it could surge to as high as $8,000.

That said, bulls may need to temper their expectations as the global macroeconomic order continues to show uncertainty, plagued with US President Donald Trump’s tariffs and the sticky inflation data, which might discourage the US Federal Reserve from cutting interest rates aggressively. Gold’s unprecedented run also confirms the shaky global economic outlook.

Will we finally see altseason?

Coming to the million dollar question, can the Ethereum Fusaka upgrade finally trigger the highly-awaited altseason? The answer to this question largely depends on how ETH behaves after the upgrade.

If the market sees meaningful capital rotation from BTC to ETH, and a surging ETH/BTC trading pair, chances of a real altseason will rise drastically. Analysts like to observe the ETH/BTC ratio, as it is usually the first early sign of an ensuing altseason.

DeFi tokens stand to benefit

Currently, the ETH/BTC trading pair has been on an extended downtrend since August 2025, trading at 0.0327 at the time of writing. Altseason enthusiasts would want to see the 0.030 support level defended, to ensure that BTC dominance doesn’t rise further.

Source: ETHBTC on TradingView.com

However, if ETH outperforms BTC in the short-term, then it must surge past the weekly resistance at 0.042 for a potential full-blown altseason. An Ethereum-led altseason may benefit the leading decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens, such as AAVE, Synthetic (SNX), and Uniswap (UNI).