Last night, Ethereum delivered a combo punch: just after midnight, it completed its 17th mainnet upgrade, Fusaka, and the price immediately broke through the $3,200 mark, where it’s still hovering now. With these two events happening together, market sentiment was instantly ignited.

The key point is that the upgrade pace has changed. In the past, everyone was used to Ethereum’s “once-a-year” upgrades—after the Merge in 2022 came Shapella, then Pectra in May this year, all basically major annual events. But this time Consensys officially announced that hard forks every six months will become the new norm. It’s only been seven months since the last Pectra upgrade, so the update frequency has effectively doubled.

This Fusaka upgrade is quite substantial, packing in 9 core EIPs along with 4 supporting proposals, making it one of the larger technical iterations in Ethereum’s history. The newly introduced PeerDAS mechanism optimizes data availability and pricing, which theoretically enables smoother network scaling and a better user experience. The technical improvements are real and significant.

Switching from annual to semi-annual upgrades actually reflects the development team’s determination to accelerate solutions for long-standing performance bottlenecks and security optimizations. For Layer 2 projects and decentralized applications, faster infrastructure iteration is definitely a good thing.

Now that the price is holding above $3,200, some say there will be a pullback after this upgrade-driven rally, while others believe the technical improvements still provide room to go higher. What do you think?