The final dress rehearsal for Ethereum’s upcoming Fusaka upgrade took place on Tuesday as the blockchain prepares for the activation of the mainnet hard fork.
The test, which went live around 18:53 UTC on the Hoodi testnet, involved the release of a number of code changes intended to make Ethereum more scalable and more cost-effective.
Testnets are copies of a blockchain’s mainnet, providing developers with a safe environment to test major upgrades and fix any issues before going live on the mainnet.
Hoodi was the last of three test nets to run through a simulation of Fusaka, with two other successful test upgrades on the Holesky and Sepolia networks.
Coming about six months after Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade, Fusaka is introducing changes designed to reduce costs for developers, users and institutions running on the network. Its centerpiece, PeerDAS, lets validators check only segments of data instead of full “blobs,” easing bandwidth requirements and lowering costs for both validators and layer-2 networks.
Once all three tests are done, developers will finalize the date when Fusaka goes live on the mainnet. According to the Ethereum Foundation, it will be at least 30 days after today’s test, which tentatively puts it at November 28th at the earliest, although core developers in a biweekly call last week discussed potentially going live on the mainnet on December 3rd.
Ethereum developers are already moving full steam ahead on the following hard fork, known as Glamsterdam. Although nothing is set in stone yet, developers plan to include proposals that work with the separation of proponents and builders.
Read more: Ethereum’s Fusaka Rolls Out on Sepolia; Hoodi Testnet Up Next
