Engineering
AERE upgrades to Fusaka, native passkey signatures now on-chain
By AERE Network
May 31, 2026
5 min read
On May 31, 2026 at 09:39:11 UTC, AERE Network activated the Fusaka EVM ruleset at block 2,106,606, the second hardfork shipped on AERE in a single day, following the Pectra activation seven hours earlier. The chain remained at one-second blocks throughout, all three validators participated cleanly through a rolling restart staged ahead of the timestamp.
Fusaka is the EVM ruleset adopted by Ethereum mainnet on December 3, 2025. AERE chain 2800 is now at full Pectra+Fusaka parity with the live Ethereum specification, within a single day of activation, no chain-halting event required.
What's new in one line: AERE smart contracts can now verify Apple Face ID, Touch ID, Windows Hello, Android biometric, YubiKey, and EU Digital Identity Wallet signatures on-chain at ~3,500 gas, roughly 70× cheaper than verifying the same signature in Solidity. This is the cryptographic foundation for biometric-login wallets on AERE.
What Fusaka brings to AERE
The marquee feature for AERE is RIP-7951, a single new precompile, but with outsized consumer-UX implications.
| EIP / RIP | What it does on AERE |
|---|
| RIP-7951 | secp256r1 / P-256 signature verification precompile at address 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000100. Fixed cost: 3,450 gas. Returns 1 if the signature is valid, 0 otherwise. This is the curve used by every modern hardware-secure-element on consumer devices. |
Why P-256 matters
Every modern smartphone, laptop, and security key already signs cryptographic operations using the secp256r1 (P-256) curve. None of them can talk to a blockchain today, because blockchains historically only verify secp256k1 (the curve used by Bitcoin and MetaMask). Until now.
With Fusaka active on AERE, the following hardware can produce signatures that smart contracts on AERE can verify natively, at production gas costs:
- Apple Secure Enclave, the dedicated security chip in every iPhone since the 5s, every iPad since 2013, every Mac with Apple Silicon. Powers Face ID, Touch ID, Apple Pay, passkeys.
- Windows Hello + TPM 2.0, biometric and PIN-protected signatures on every modern Windows PC.
- Android Keystore + StrongBox, hardware-backed signatures on Android devices.
- YubiKey, Google Titan, SoloKey, Ledger Stax, Trezor Safe 5, hardware security keys.
- WebAuthn / Passkeys (W3C standard), the cross-platform passwordless-login standard used by Apple iCloud Keychain, Google Password Manager, Microsoft Authenticator, 1Password, Dashlane.
- EMV credit and debit cards, every modern chip card.
- e-Passports, government eID cards, and the EU Digital Identity Wallet (eIDAS 2.0), the upcoming continent-wide identity standard.
Before Fusaka, verifying any one of these signatures on-chain via Solidity cost roughly 250,000 gas, too expensive for everyday transactions. With the RIP-7951 precompile, it costs 3,450 gas, well within the budget of an ordinary user operation. The signature primitive that powers every consumer device on Earth is now economically usable on AERE.
What this unlocks
- Wallet login with biometrics, no seed phrase. A user opens an AERE wallet app, performs Face ID, and signs a transaction. The Apple Secure Enclave produces a P-256 signature. The wallet relays it to AERE. The on-chain smart wallet contract verifies the signature via the precompile, and the transaction executes. No 12-word seed phrase. No password. No private key the user can lose or expose.
- Hardware-bound security. Because the P-256 private key lives in tamper-resistant hardware on the user's device, malware on the phone cannot exfiltrate it. Phishing sites cannot trick the user into revealing it. The user cannot accidentally email or screenshot it.
- Cross-device wallet recovery via passkey sync. iCloud Keychain and Google Password Manager already sync passkeys across the user's devices. A user who switches to a new iPhone gets their AERE wallet back automatically, with no migration step.
- EU Digital Identity Wallet integration. The EUDI Wallet (mandatory across the EU under eIDAS 2.0) uses P-256 signatures. AERE applications can verify an EU-issued identity attestation on-chain natively. Critical groundwork for compliant on-chain finance products in Europe.
- Modern hardware wallets. Ledger Stax, Trezor Safe 5, and GridPlus Lattice2 all ship P-256 alongside secp256k1. AERE can verify their P-256 signatures cheaply, opening the door to passkey-style hardware wallet UX without legacy secp256k1 flows.
The upgrade procedure
Same playbook as Pectra, executed seven hours earlier the same day:
- Confirmed Hyperledger Besu v26.4.0 on all 3 validators supports the Osaka hardfork (Besu's name for Fusaka).
- Generated a new genesis with
osakaTime: 1780220351 (2026-05-31 09:39:11 UTC), backed up the existing Pectra-era genesis as genesis.pre-fusaka.bak.
- Pushed the new genesis to all 3 validators and rolling-restarted each one with 5+ minutes between restarts. Quorum maintained throughout.
- At the fork timestamp, the chain transitioned cleanly. The first post-fork block was 2,106,606.
- Verified Fusaka active by inspecting block-header fields and probing the secp256r1 precompile at
0x100.
What's next
With Pectra and Fusaka now both active, AERE has the cryptographic primitives needed for the next wave of consumer wallet UX:
- EIP-7702 + RIP-7951 together = passkey-signed smart-account transactions, gas-sponsored by application paymasters. The cleanest "Face ID → transaction" path possible on EVM today.
- Coinbase Smart Wallet, Privy, Para, and other passkey-aware wallet stacks now work on AERE the same way they work on Base, Polygon, Optimism, and Arbitrum.
- Non-custodial neobank applications built on AERE inherit Face ID / Touch ID onboarding directly, no seed-phrase prompt, no custodial intermediary.
The chain layer is now ready. The application layer is where the work continues.
← Back to all posts