Moving to Fusaka and Verkle trees

Verkle trees and staking efficiency

I recommend the shift toward Verkle trees as the most practical way to manage staking in the current network state. Verkle trees allow for stateless validator clients that operate with near-zero hard disk space and sync almost instantly. This technical progression follows the Pectra upgrade in May 2025, which used EIP-7251 to raise the maximum effective balance for staking from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH. The upcoming Fusaka release, scheduled for December 3, introduces PeerDAS (EIP-7594) to reduce validator bandwidth and storage requirements by up to 85%. This scaling mechanism works alongside a rising gas limit under EIP-7935, which moves the limit from 45 million toward a target of 150 million. The Pectra rollout also utilized EIP-7691 to increase maximum blob capacity from 6 to 9. Following the Pectra launch, ETH price jumped 40% in three days to reclaim $2,500. ETH remains 38% higher than its pre-upgrade level. Daily Ethereum transactions climbed from 1.25 million to 1.75 million. Active addresses increased by 243,000. Gas prices dropped to 0.04 Gwei. Most notably, 26 companies hold ETH on their balance sheets.

EOF and compatibility risks

The Ethereum Object Format (EOF) provides a more structured approach to contract creation. The implementation of EIP-8200 ensures that existing contracts calling these addresses continue to function without modification by deploying EVM bytecode directly at the existing precompile address at the time of the fork for all users. This process replaces the RIPEMD-160, MODEXP, and BLAKE2f precompiles with equivalent bytecode. EIP-7676 also prepares for address space extension by preventing the trimming of the top 12 bytes of an address operand in EOF. If you are managing existing contracts, you should know that the removal of CALLCODE and SELFDESTRUCT from EOF containers aims to improve safety. I observe that gas costs for these calls will now follow standard opcode costs instead of precompile-specific formulas. The upgrade also includes EIP-7951 to add native support for the P-256 elliptic curve and EIP-7939 to add a count leading zeros instruction to the EVM. EIP-7825 introduces spam resistance checks to keep nodes stable. I find that the change in gas costs for modular exponentiation might cause reverts for contracts that rely on precise gas calculations. A developer noted that ERC-721 might become unimplementable on EOF(v1) unless an opcode is added to check if an account has code. Will the transition to higher gas costs for modular exponentiation cause enough reverts to destabilize contracts that rely on precise gas calculations?

Security audits and agent performance

I track the efficacy of security audits to evaluate the risks of new contract formats. AI agents demonstrate significant differences in their ability to find flaws in smart contract code. Claude Opus 4.6 reaches a 45.9% detection rate, while GPT-5.3-Codex (xhigh reasoning) hits 40.7%. Even with high reasoning, these agents struggle with complexity. I look at the performance of these tools to judge the security of the latest deployments.

The implementation of PeerDAS helps rollups like Arbitrum and Optimism by reducing data costs. Fusaka aims to reduce Layer 2 transaction costs by 40% to 60% by expanding blob capacity. I see that the expansion of the gas limit to 150 million allows for more complex applications within a single block. In 2025, the Sequence audit found a high-severity issue where a chained signature with checkpoint usage disabled could bypass all checkpointer validation. I also noticed that the 2024 Wildcat audit identified a high-severity vulnerability where users could withdraw more than supposed to, forcing the last user withdraw to fail. These findings show that manual verification remains necessary.