Crypto asset management firm Bitwise said Ethereum’s Fusaka upgrade, expected to go live later Wednesday, is the kind of crude infrastructure change that markets tend to overlook in real time and then credit later for making the network feel more robust and more investable.
The upgrade is constructive for Ethereum over time because it expands capacity, improves validator efficiency as rollups grow and, most importantly, strengthens the blockchain’s ability to capture value from layer-2 activity, analyst Max Shannon wrote.
Fusaka also raises the layer-1 gas limit to 60 million per block, a move that should lift throughput and take some pressure off fees, roughly doubling capacity over a year, according to Shannon’s estimates.
On the validation side, PeerDAS reduces the data burden needed to verify blobs and helps Ethereum scale without pushing node requirements out of reach, the report said.
Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade, which went live last March, introduced blobs, which attach large chunks of data to regular transactions, storing data off-chain without overloading the mainnet, unlike call data, which is stored permanently.
The biggest change, however, is financial, the analyst said. Fusaka introduces a minimum blobbase fee (EIP-7918) that addresses a post-Dencun quirk where fees can drop to near zero during quiet periods, dampening ETH burn and weakening the link between real consumption and value addition.
Under Fusaka, the blob fee gets a floor tied to execution fees, roughly the execution base fee divided by 16, creating a more consistent earnings and fuel flow as stablecoins, decentralized finance (DeFi) and tokenization migrate to rollups, the analyst said.
He cautioned slightly that upgrades don’t reliably trigger lasting ether prices that are often a mild sell-news pattern, but argued that Fusaka further cements Ethereum’s role as a settlement layer for on-chain, increasingly institutional, finance.
Read more: Ethereum developers prepare for Fusaka, second upgrade in 2025
