Ethereum’s ‘Fusaka’ Upgrade Cements Network’s Role as On-Chain Finance Settlement Layer: Bitwise

Crypto Asset Management firm Bitwise said Ethereum’s Fusaka upgrade, expected to go live later Wednesday, is the kind of unflashy infrastructure change markets tend to overlook in real time, and then credit later for making the network feel sturdier 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 limit to 60 million per block, a move that should lift throughput and take some pressure off fees, roughly doubling capacity over a year, by Shannon’s estimate.

On the validator side, PeerDAS reduces the data burden needed to verify blobs, helping Ethereum scale without pushing node requirements out of reach, the report said.

Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade, which went live in March last year, introduced blobs, which attach large data chunks to regular transactions, storing data offchain without congesting the mainnet, unlike call data which is stored permanently.

The biggest change, though, is economic, the analyst said. Fusaka introduces a minimum blob base fee (EIP-7918), addressing a post-Dencun quirk where fees can sink to near zero in quiet periods, dampening ETH burn and weakening the link between real usage and value accrual.

Under Fusaka, the blob fee gets 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 don’t reliably spark lasting ether price pops, there’s often a mild sell-the-news pattern, but argued that Fusaka further cements Ethereum’s role as the settlement layer for on-chain, increasingly institutional, finance.

Read more: Ethereum Developers Prep for Fusaka, Second Upgrade of 2025