Ethereum core developers are finalizing protocol upgrades focused on performance and efficiency ahead of the upcoming Fusaka fork, set for deployment on Monday.

The consensus reached during the June 19 All Core Devs call involves a targeted set of enhancements for Devnet-2, alongside preparations for more substantial changes in Devnet-3. The upgrades prioritize optimizations over new features.

Key parameters confirmed include:

• 45 Million Gas Limit: Already under testing, this increase could potentially boost Ethereum’s transaction throughput by over 11%, contingent on maintaining safe block propagation times.
• Blob Transaction Limits: EIP-7892 caps the number of data blobs per transaction, preventing monopolization of blob space by a single entity.
• Contract Size Cap: Adopting the streamlined 48 KB limit from EIP-7907.
• New Opcode: EIP-7939 introduces the CLZ opcode (“count leading zeros”) to improve certain EVM operations.
• Blob Fee Floor: Finalized at 16 wei per kilobyte, as per EIP-7918, ensuring predictable minimum costs.

These changes solidify what was previously a more fluid concept into a concrete package for deployment.

A notable low-level enhancement, EIP-7939, adds a widely used instruction found in other virtual machines, potentially offering minor but meaningful improvements in smart contract execution efficiency and supporting certain cryptographic operations.

Separately, EIP-7951, providing native support for the widely adopted secp256r1 cryptographic curve, will enhance Ethereum’s compatibility, particularly beneficial for mobile and enterprise applications using WebAuthn-based authentication or other related integrations.

The revised Fusaka scope has prompted criticism from Ethereum stakeholders like Paradigm’s Georgios Konstantopoulos, highlighting unresolved issues with the “stack too deep” error and the 24 KB bytecode size limit. However, developers defending the current plan cited these problems as having been prioritized earlier and effectively sidelined by project-specific changes.

Despite lacking headline-grabbing features, the upgrades are positioned to enhance Ethereum’s performance with a focus on managing associated risks.