Ethereum has evolved rapidly over the past few years, adapting to a dramatically changing environment. In the early years, all transactions were processed directly on the Ethereum mainnet. However, as the network grew congested, gas fees soared and transaction speeds slowed. To solve this, a new solution emerged — Layer 2, commonly known as L2 rollup networks. L2s are designed to maintain Ethereum’s security while processing far more transactions quickly and at lower cost.
Ethereum is now transitioning into a model where most transactions take place on L2s, while the mainnet mainly serves as a settlement and verification layer. This vision is called the “rollup-centric roadmap.” It is not a mere optimization but a fundamental restructuring of Ethereum’s architecture. As L2s expand rapidly, users are increasingly active off the mainnet, reinforcing Ethereum’s identity as “the foundational infrastructure beneath all L2s.”
Yet this transformation has introduced new challenges. The most pressing issue is economic: Ethereum’s revenue capture has not kept pace with the explosive growth of L2s. While L2s charge users fees and build their own ecosystems, Ethereum itself provides the underlying security and data availability but receives limited economic reward. This imbalance became more evident after the introduction of “blobs” — a new form of data storage. Posting data to Ethereum via blobs became so cheap that storage costs often approached zero. As a result, no matter how much L2 activity increased, the mainnet saw little corresponding financial gain.
Scalability is another critical challenge. As the L2 ecosystem expands, so does the volume of data that needs to be stored on Ethereum. In the current design, every node downloads and verifies the same full dataset, creating limits on storage and bandwidth. While manageable at today’s scale, this model cannot sustain global adoption with hundreds of millions of users. Ethereum thus needed a breakthrough that could maintain decentralization while scaling data throughput.
The Fusaka upgrade directly addresses both of these structural problems. Far from a simple feature addition, Fusaka redefines what Ethereum must look like as the core infrastructure of the L2 era. It preserves the strengths of the existing network while vastly increasing data capacity and rebalancing the economic relationship between L2s and Ethereum itself.
One of the most important innovations is the introduction of PeerDAS (Data Availability Sampling). Unlike prior models, PeerDAS allows nodes to verify data availability without each storing or downloading the entire dataset. Instead, the data is split into small fragments, and participating nodes store and verify only a subset. By collaboratively sampling data, the network can ensure integrity without requiring every node to process identical information. This yields tremendous scalability: individual node demands remain manageable while overall data throughput increases manyfold.
This change is crucial for Ethereum’s long-term future. As more L2s appear and generate more data, all of it must still be posted to Ethereum for security. Without such innovations, L2 scalability would hit a ceiling. PeerDAS provides the structural foundation to overcome that bottleneck, allowing Ethereum to support global-scale services and billions of users while preserving decentralization.
Another major component of Fusaka is the redesign of the blob fee market. Previously, blob fees automatically adjusted based on demand. In practice, however, L2 operators optimized their data posting, keeping blob fees persistently low. As a consequence, Ethereum earned minimal revenue for providing secure data availability, and ETH burn rates fell below expectations.
Fusaka introduces mechanisms to stabilize and reprice this market — for example, by setting minimum blob fees and reducing excessive volatility. The goal is twofold: ensure Ethereum receives fair compensation for secure data storage, and allow L2s to operate under predictable cost structures. This realigns economic incentives so that Ethereum and L2 ecosystems grow symbiotically rather than in isolation.
These fee structure changes directly affect Ethereum’s monetary dynamics. Because blob fees are burned, a steady, sustainable burn rate links network activity to ETH supply reduction. Under Fusaka, as L2 usage increases, ETH burns naturally rise, reinforcing ETH’s scarcity and strengthening its value as a digital asset. Previously, Ethereum’s economic linkage to L2 growth was weak — now, it becomes intrinsic.
To better grasp Fusaka’s role, it helps to contrast it with the Pectra upgrade. Pectra focused on improving core functionality and user experience — wallet features, staking refinements, and blob capacity increases. Fusaka, by contrast, tackles Ethereum’s structural challenges: scalability, sustainability, and economic realignment. Together, these two upgrades form complementary pillars supporting Ethereum’s evolution in the L2-centric era.
Ultimately, the Fusaka upgrade clarifies Ethereum’s strategic direction. Ethereum is no longer a network that directly processes every transaction; it is becoming the reliable settlement and data availability layer powering all L2 activity. As the L2 ecosystem expands, Ethereum naturally benefits economically, while security and decentralization are preserved through technologies such as PeerDAS.
The implications of Fusaka extend well beyond technical optimization. It marks Ethereum’s move from being merely a “smart contract platform” to becoming the foundational data availability layer of the global L2 network. In the coming years, as applications, financial systems, games, social platforms, and even AI-driven services increasingly operate on L2s, all their critical data will still be securely anchored on Ethereum. Fusaka lays the groundwork to make that vision real.
In the long term, Fusaka represents a structural adjustment essential for Ethereum to become the infrastructure of the future internet. It ensures that Ethereum can handle the coming explosion of data while remaining economically sustainable. By aligning L2 growth with Ethereum’s own growth, achieving scalability without sacrificing decentralization, and strengthening ETH’s economic foundation, Fusaka stands as a defining upgrade for the next decade of Ethereum.
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