Ethereum stakeholders believe the 2025 transaction count record can be linked to a combination of high throughput and low costs, which were directly linked to the two major network upgrades that occurred during the year: the Pectra and Fusaka upgrades.
The Fusaka upgrade went live earlier this month and has been singled out as the most probable and immediate cause for the achievement of the new record. The upgrade directly expanded the capacity of the Ethereum L1 blockchain, increasing the size of each block by roughly 33%.
That increase may seem minute, but it has allowed the L1 network to fit significantly more transactions into every block. In the past, all nodes were tasked with downloading all data, which resulted in a bottleneck.
The Fusaka upgrade introduced PeerDAS, a new feature that has made it possible for nodes to verify data “blobs”, large chunks of transaction data, by sampling just tiny parts of them. Blobs are like sidecars attached to the main block and carry data cheaply without competing with standard transactions.
The Fusaka upgrade follows the Pectra upgrade, which was implemented in May, laying the groundwork for scaling by optimizing how Layer 2 networks, such as Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base, interact with the main chain.
Pectra doubled the number of the aforementioned “sidecars” from 3 to 6 per block. And because there was suddenly double the supply of space for Layer 2 data, the cost for L2s to “settle” on Ethereum dropped.
The Pectra and Fusaka upgrades have kept the overall network uncongested and resulted in lower average gas fees. However, scaling challenges still exist within the ecosystem.
There is also the fact that the Ethereum ecosystem as a whole is fractured, and users still find it challenging to use L2 funds, as that involves navigating complicated bridges and routes.
The fragmentation issue remains a big one, but every now and then, a new L2 pops up, and the database of all accounts, balances, and smart contracts (the “State”) keeps growing larger and larger.
If this keeps up, the State becomes terabytes or petabytes in size. And if it gets too big, it becomes impossible for a normal person to buy a hard drive big enough to run a node.
Despite the critical issues fragmentation poses, Ethereum continues to attract institutional players.
