Crypto Asset Management firm Bitwise said Ethereum’s Fusaka upgrade, which is expected to go live later Wednesday, is the kind of low-key infrastructure change that markets tend to overlook in real time, and then credit it for making the network feel stronger 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, wrote analyst Max Shannon.
Fusaka also raises the layer 1 gas cap to 60 million per block, a move that should boost throughput and relieve some pressure on rates, roughly doubling capacity in a year, according to Shannon’s estimate.
On the validator side, PeerDAS reduces the data overhead needed to verify blobs, helping Ethereum scale without leaving node requirements out of reach, according to the report.
Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade, which launched in March last year, introduced blobs, which attach large chunks of data to regular transactions, storing data off-chain without congesting the mainnet, unlike call data which is stored permanently.
However, the biggest change is economic, said the analyst. Fusaka introduces a minimum base fee for blobs (EIP-7918), which addresses a post-Dencun quirk where fees can drop to near zero in quiet periods, reducing ETH burning and weakening the link between actual usage and value accumulation.
Under Fusaka, the blob fee gets a floor tied to execution fees, roughly the base execution fee divided by 16, creating a more consistent burn and revenue stream as stablecoins, decentralized finance (DeFi), and tokenization migrate to accumulations, the analyst said.
Bitwise cautioned that upgrades do not reliably cause long-lasting increases in the price of ether – there is often a mild news selling pattern – but argued that Fusaka further cements Ethereum’s role as a settlement layer for increasingly institutional on-chain finance.
Read more: Ethereum developers prepare for Fusaka, second update of 2025
