What are the benefits of the Fusaka upgrade for Ethereum?

Author: Haotian; Source: X, @tmel0211

Some friends are surprised: Why is there so little discussion about Ethereum’s Fusaka upgrade? Because unlike the previous PoW to PoS transition and the Dencun upgrade, this upgrade is a typical “engineering optimization.” There’s no conceptual hype, no paradigm innovation—just solid cost reduction, efficiency improvements, user experience optimization, and solving some concrete problems:

Isn’t this exactly the state a mature public chain should be in? Let’s see what Fusaka actually brings to the table:

1) Significant reduction in L2 costs. Currently, the main expense for L2 is the DA cost of publishing data to L1. Fusaka expands Blobs 8x and introduces PeerDAS random sampling verification, slashing L2 costs by more than half.

Many people have become desensitized to L2 fee reductions, believing the main constraint for L2 is ecosystem activity, and simply lowering fees is meaningless. But if you move away from the traditional general-purpose L2 mindset and look from the perspective of Specific application chains, the significance is completely different. For example: Arbitrum’s fee reduction directly stimulates its RWA infrastructure activity, further reductions on Base will boost the x402 payment ecosystem, and the upcoming MegaETH will be directly stimulated in high-frequency DeFi and gaming scenarios, and more.

The market shouldn’t just focus on how much L2 fees drop, but on which high-frequency application scenarios are activated by the cost reduction.

2) Normalization of the Blob fee market, ETH Burn expectations reignited. After the Dencun upgrade, falling Blob fees caused the mainnet to lose its ability to be fed by L2, and Ethereum shifted from deflationary to slight inflation.

Fusaka introduces a minimum Blob base fee (EIP-7918), meaning that even if Blob demand is low, L2s still have to pay a minimum toll, and ETH will still be burned as it should.

This is actually a return to normal. Once ETH daily burn levels return to pre-Dencun levels after the upgrade, the expected ETH deflationary trajectory is not far off, and the long-term narrative of ETH as the global settlement layer’s value anchor will finally have a firm footing.

3) Gas Limit raised to 60M, significant increase in L1 throughput. In today’s public chain narrative where 100,000+ TPS is thrown around, few care about Ethereum boosting its TPS by a few dozen or a hundred.

But don’t forget, the Ethereum you called “halal and stagnant” is actually about to increase its TPS, and this time, instead of moving sluggishly, it’s bursting with execution efficiency—crucially, it’s going head-to-head with Solana. Plus, its long-term, simplified strategy to improve L1 performance is still in play. How can you not give it a thumbs up?

Essentially, Ethereum used to have a single-track, Rollup-Centric strategy, overly constrained by the L2 track. Now, with a dual-track strategy of L1 settlement + L2 execution advancing in parallel, there’s more flexibility and imagination.

4) PeerDAS lowers validator threshold by 85%. I think this is the most easily overlooked but most profound change in Fusaka. With a random sampling verification mechanism for a small portion of data, the decentralization of Ethereum validators will substantially improve, directly addressing Vitalik Buterin’s concerns about institutional control over Ethereum.

In a way, PeerDAS is actually a lightweight realization of Ethereum’s sharding vision, achieving many of the goals that pie-in-the-sky sharding strategies aimed for, including reducing node burden, enhancing network scalability, and strengthening decentralization.

Moreover, PeerDAS’s greater significance is in completely removing the technical barriers for institutions to participate—for example, in node operations, staking, and other compliance-related business. When Fidelity, BlackRock, and other TradFi giants can deeply participate in Ethereum’s economic activity, that’s when the Ethereum ecosystem will truly explode.

That’s all.

So here’s the question: a more mature, more robust, more efficient ETH that can also scale institutionally, develop on dual L1+L2 tracks, and capture value through mild deflation—isn’t it worth believing in again?