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 6:53 p.m. UTC on the Hoodi testnet, involved adopting a series of code changes intended to make Ethereum more scalable and profitable.
Testnets are replicas of a blockchain’s mainnet, providing developers with a safe environment to test major upgrades and resolve any issues before they go live on the mainnet.
Hoodi was the last of the three testnets to run a simulation of Fusaka, with two other successful test upgrades on the Holesky and Sepolia networks.
Roughly six months after Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade, Fusaka is introducing changes intended to reduce costs for developers, users, and institutions operating on the network. Its centerpiece, PeerDAS, allows validators to verify only segments of data instead of entire “blobs,” easing bandwidth demands and reducing expenses for validators and Layer 2 networks.
Once all three tests are completed, the developers will finalize the date when Fusaka will go live on the mainnet. According to the Ethereum Foundation, this will be at least 30 days after today’s test, which is tentatively expected to be November 28 at the earliest, although core developers, in a bi-weekly call last week, discussed the possibility of going live on the mainnet on December 3.
Ethereum developers are already moving full steam ahead on the next hard fork, known as Glamsterdam. Although nothing is set in stone yet, proponents plan to include proposals working on the separation between proponent and builder.
Read more: Ethereum’s Fusaka rolls out to Sepolia; Hoodi Testnet Next
