At 5:49 AM on December 4, Ethereum is making a big move—the Fusaka upgrade will officially go live on the mainnet.

What’s the most eye-catching part of this upgrade? The blob capacity has been expanded, and Layer 2 network fees are slashed by 85%. Remember when a transfer used to cost a few dollars? Now it can basically be done for a few cents, and throughput has also shot up.

The technology called PeerDAS might sound complicated, but put simply, it makes data verification much smarter. The required bandwidth for validator nodes can be reduced by 80%, which naturally speeds up transaction confirmation. The gas limit has also jumped from 45 million to 150 million, effectively tripling the network capacity and making it more resilient to attacks.

For regular users, the most noticeable change is: on-chain operations are now faster and cheaper.