Crypto asset management firm Bitwise said Ethereum’s Fusaka upgrade, which is expected to go live later Wednesday, is the kind of quiet infrastructure change that markets tend to overlook in real time, then later credit for making the network stronger and more investable.
The upgrade is constructive for Ethereum over time because it increases capacity, improves validator efficiency as rollups increase, and, more importantly, strengthens the blockchain’s ability to capture value from layer 2 activity, wrote analyst Max Shannon.
Fusaka is also raising the layer 1 gas limit to 60 million per block, a move that is expected to increase throughput and ease pressure on fees, roughly doubling capacity over a year, according to Shannon’s estimate.
On the validator side, PeerDAS reduces the data overhead needed to verify blobs, helping Ethereum scale without putting node requirements out of reach, the report said.
Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade, which went live in March last year, introduced blobs, which attach large chunks of data to regular transactions, storing the data off-chain without cluttering the mainnet, unlike call data which is stored permanently.
The biggest change, however, is economic, the analyst said. Fusaka introduces minimum base fees for blobs (EIP-7918), addressing a post-Dencun quirk where fees can drop to near zero in quiet periods, mitigating ETH consumption and weakening the link between actual usage and value accumulation.
Under Fusaka, blob fees get a floor tied to execution fees, roughly the execution base fee divided by 16, creating a more consistent revenue and burn stream as stablecoins, decentralized finance (DeFi) and tokenization migrate to rollups, the analyst said.
Bitwise cautioned that upgrades do not reliably trigger sustained increases in ether prices, there is often a slight news selling pattern, but argued that Fusaka further strengthens Ethereum’s role as a settlement layer for increasingly institutional on-chain finance.
Learn more: Ethereum Developer Preparation for Fusaka, Second Upgrade of 2025
