Ethereum's Fusaka upgrade went live on December 3, 2025, boosting the network's scalability and coinciding with a price surge above $3,000. The upgrade targets lower Layer-2 fees and improved data availability. Analysts are divided on whether this signals a larger rally ahead.
On December 3, 2025, Ethereum activated its Fusaka hard fork at slot 13,164,544 and 21:49 UTC, marking the blockchain's second major upgrade of the year. Fusaka combines the Fulu and Osaka updates across consensus and execution layers, incorporating 12 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) to enhance scalability for Layer-2 networks. The core change, PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling), allows validators to verify small slices of blob data rather than full downloads, reducing bandwidth and storage needs by 80-85% and enabling up to 8x blob throughput scaling over time.
This upgrade raises the effective block gas limit from around 36 million to 60 million, allowing more on-chain transactions per block. It paves the way for follow-up parameter adjustments in late December 2025 and early 2026 to further cut Layer-2 costs. Rollups such as Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base are projected to see 40-60% fee reductions, according to developer estimates. Additionally, Fusaka introduces native support for passkey-style authentication using secp256r1 signatures, eliminating seed phrases for easier institutional and mainstream adoption.
The activation aligned with a strong price rebound, with Ethereum trading around $3,050-$3,150, up 4-9% in the past 24 hours. Coinbase reported $3,124 per ETH, with a market cap near $378 billion and 24-hour volume of about $27 billion. This follows a weekly gain of 3-4% but remains down 15% monthly and 18% yearly from an all-time high of $4,954 in August 2025.
Institutional interest also surged, with crypto ETFs recording $1.1 billion in net inflows last week, the largest in seven weeks. Vanguard now permits trading of spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, while Bank of America allows up to 4% crypto allocations in some portfolios. Short-term, support sits at $2,800, with resistance at $3,100-$3,300; bulls eye $3,500-$5,000, while bears warn of drops to $2,400 if support fails.