Author: Haotian
Some friends are surprised that there's been so little discussion about the Ethereum Fusaka upgrade. Unlike previous PoW to PoS upgrades and the Dencun upgrade, this upgrade is a typical "engineering-driven optimization." It lacks conceptual hype and paradigm-shifting innovation; it simply focuses on solidly reducing costs, improving efficiency, optimizing the user experience, and solving specific problems.
Isn't this the state a mature public blockchain should be in? Come on, let's see what Fusaka can bring.
1) L2 costs are significantly reduced. Currently, the main overhead of L2 is the cost of DA (Data Access) for publishing data to L1. Fusaka has reduced the cost of L2 by more than half by scaling up Blob by 8 times and using PeerDAS random sampling verification.
Many people have become desensitized to lowering L2 fees, believing that the main obstacle to L2 is ecosystem activity, and simply reducing fees is meaningless. However, if we discard the past mindset of general L2 and look at it from the perspective of specific application chains, the meaning is completely different. For example:
The fee reduction of @arbitrum will stimulate the activity of its RWA infrastructure, the further reduction of @base will promote the development of the x402 payment ecosystem, and the upcoming expansion of @megaeth in high-frequency DeFi and gaming application scenarios will all have a direct impact.
The market should not only focus on how much L2 fees have been reduced, but also on which high-frequency application scenarios have been activated due to cost reductions;
2) The normalization of Blob fees has reignited expectations for an ETH Burn. Following the Dencun upgrade, the decline in Blob fees temporarily deprived the mainnet of the ability to receive backflow from L2 cryptocurrencies, causing Ethereum to shift from a deflationary state to a state of slight inflation.
Fusaka introduced a minimum base fee for Blobs (EIP-7918), meaning that even if Blob demand is low, L2 will still have to pay the minimum toll, and ETH will still have to be burned.
This is actually a return to normal. Once the daily Burn volume of upgraded ETH returns to the level before the Dencun upgrade, the expected deflationary trajectory of ETH will not be far off, and the long-term narrative of ETH as the value anchor of the global settlement layer can be firmly established.
3) Gas Limit increased to 60M, resulting in a significant improvement in L1 throughput. Given the current narrative of public chains boasting 100,000+ TPS, people are naturally indifferent to Ethereum's claims of improving TPS by tens or hundreds.
But don't forget, Ethereum, which you all criticize as being too 'halal,' is actually going to improve its TPS. Moreover, it has changed its previous laid-back and slow-paced state and its execution efficiency has exploded. The key is that it is going to go head-to-head with @solana. In addition, its long-term strategy of simplifying Ethereum to improve L1 performance deserves our praise!
Essentially, Ethereum previously employed a single-leg strategy of Rollup Centric, which was overly constrained by the L2 track. However, the current dual-track strategy of L1 settlement and L2 execution offers more flexibility and potential.
4) PeerDAS lowers the barrier to entry for validators by 85%. I believe this is the most easily overlooked yet most significant change in Fusaka. The mechanism of randomly sampling a small portion of the data for verification will substantially improve the decentralization of Ethereum validators, and also addresses @VitalikButerin's previous concerns about institutional control of Ethereum.
To some extent, PeerDAS is actually a lightweight implementation of Ethereum's sharding concept, achieving multiple goals that the pie-in-the-sky sharding strategy aims to achieve, including reducing node burden, improving network scalability, and enhancing decentralization.
Furthermore, PeerDAS's greater significance lies in completely dismantling the technical barriers to institutional entry, such as allowing institutions to participate in node maintenance, staking, and other compliance-related businesses. The true starting point for the Ethereum ecosystem's explosive growth will only come when TradFi giants like Fidelity and BlackRock can deeply contribute to Ethereum's economic activity.
above.
The question is, is a more mature, stable, and efficient $ETH that also boasts institutional expansion, L1+L2 dual-track development, and micro-deflationary value capture worth believing in again?
