Fusaka: Ethereum’s Value-Aware Upgrade Post Merge
Ethereum’s roadmap has been remarkably consistent for years: scale via rollups, reduce node requirements, simplify the protocol, and improve user experience. Past hard forks have delivered on pieces of that vision in isolation—making the network faster, protecting validator hardware, or patching pricing and execution edge cases once they became painful enough.
Fusaka is different. Sure, more Blob-space is important, but It is the first upgrade that intentionally integrates all of those concerns into a single, coherent economic stance. With Fusaka, the protocol is no longer just trying to “make the network faster,” “protect validator hardware,” or “tidy up fee markets.” It encodes a broader principle directly into the chain’s rules:
Decentralization requires aligning participation, value accrual, and user capture.
Decentralization has never been a single variable, it is an equilibrium across multiple dimensions, whether or not we choose to name them. Fusaka makes that structure explicit by foregrounding three pillars:
Participation: who can realistically run a node or validate.
Value accrual: who captures the economic upside when the system succeeds.
User capture: who chooses to actually use the system in practice.
Fusaka introduces new mechanisms to help Ethereum grow its user base, scale its data throughput, and defend validator accessibility, while explicitly ensuring that ETH captures value from increased usage. Previous upgrades have touched each of these dimensions indirectly. Fusaka is the first to introduce explicit mechanisms for all three at once, and that is the philosophical leap, and why it is the first truly value-aware hard fork since the merge.
Pillar 1 — Participation: Keeping the Marginal Validator Alive
Ethereum continues to treat hardware accessibility as a hard constraint. The core assumption is that if only wealthy, professionally operated data centers can validate, then decentralization collapses. Fusaka reinforces that assumption by shaping protocol changes around the survival of the marginal validator and ensuring that node requirements remain predictable and bounded. Concretely, the upgrade strengthens participation by:
Reducing per-validator data load through PeerDAS sampling for blob data, so each node only stores and serves a fraction of blob data rather than the entire payload (EIP-7594).
Enabling protocol-coordinated history expiry by having nodes advertise the historical block range they serve and simplifying receipts, which supports a spec-defined regime for dropping very old history while keeping sync sane (EIP-7642).
Placing explicit caps on worst-case workloads with input size limits for the MODEXP precompile, a maximum per-transaction gas limit of 2²⁴ gas, and a hard cap on the RLP-encoded execution block size around 8 MiB, so no single transaction or block can impose unbounded computation or bandwidth costs (EIP-7823, EIP-7825, EIP-7934).
Keeping block propagation predictable under rising throughput by combining these gas, transaction, and block-size caps, which together bound worst-case propagation and validation time even as the default gas limit increases (EIP-7823, EIP-7825, EIP-7934).
These changes reaffirm the social contract that any competent participant with reasonable hardware should still be able to run a node and join validation. Fusaka treats participation as the bedrock, as without a broad, diverse validator set, the rest of the economic story does not hold.
Pillar 2 — Value Accrual: Pricing Ethereum’s Importance
This is where Fusaka steps into genuinely new territory. Historically, besides staking and burning ETH, Ethereum has treated value accrual as an emergent side effect of usage. When more users showed up, gas fees tended to rise. When blockspace was scarce, ETH captured some of that scarcity value. Before the Dencun hard fork when rollups posted calldata, the base layer earned fees as a byproduct of data availability demand. The protocol itself did not aggressively assert pricing power, it exposed scarce resources and let markets do the rest.
Fusaka changes that mindset. The upgrade encodes explicit pricing rules that ensure critical resources cannot be systematically mispriced or free-ridden:
Floors on data availability costs come from the blob base-fee being bounded by execution costs, which pins a reserve price under each blob so the blob fee market remains responsive to congestion and never gets stuck at 1 wei (EIP-7918).
Incremental tuning of blob capacity is enabled by blob-parameter-only forks, which let client teams safely adjust target and maximum blobs between major upgrades, keeping DA capacity aligned with L2 demand rather than fixed to a single fork cadence (EIP-7892).
Corrected cost models for expensive computation are delivered by MODEXP gas repricing, which increases costs for large exponents and inputs so gas usage matches real compute and no single cryptographic operation can silently dominate a block (EIP-7883).
Guardrails against extreme or adversarial resource use are shared with the participation pillar: the MODEXP input cap, per-transaction gas cap, and block-size limit ensure that abuse of underpriced operations or extreme transaction shapes cannot distort fee dynamics or destabilize clients (EIP-7823, EIP-7825, EIP-7934).
These are not cosmetic fee tweaks. They are part of a broader shift where Ethereum asserts its role as the settlement and data availability layer of the ecosystem in rule-based economic terms. For end users and holders, this matters because Fusaka makes ETH’s role as an economic commodity more predictable and more defensible. The relationship between network usage, resource consumption, and ETH-denominated revenue becomes much clearer, which strengthens the foundation for long-term valuation models and protocol-level capital formation. With Wall Street being a main character participant now, having clear valuation models means potentially longer term views being based in reality and not vibes.
Fusaka lays more groundwork for value accrual beyond simple fee curves by making future proposers transparent (EIP-7917), which is a prerequisite for credible preconfirmation schemes and onchain orderflow markets. That transparency enables higher-layer designs where more MEV can be handled via explicit, protocol-aligned auctions instead of opaque offchain deals, even though those specific markets will live above the base layer.
Pillar 3 — User Capture: A Better Protocol Wins on UX, Not Just Security
Ethereum today is secure, credibly neutral, and battle-tested. Its social and technical layers have withstood years of shocks. But those properties alone do not guarantee user loyalty. If interacting with Ethereum feels complicated, slow, or fragile, users will move to environments that feel simpler and more responsive, even if those environments are less robust under the hood.
Fusaka acknowledges this competitive reality by adding UX-facing primitives directly into the protocol rather than leaving everything to wallets and middleware. It introduces:
Seedless, passkey-style onboarding via the secp256r1 (P-256) signature precompile, which lets wallets use platform-native passkeys and secure enclaves instead of forcing users through fragile seed phrase flows (EIP-7951).
Lower-latency, more predictable inclusion through deterministic proposer lookahead, where the Beacon Chain learns upcoming proposers an epoch in advance. This gives wallets and apps something concrete to target when they request preconfirmations or plan transaction submission, reducing uncertainty around when a transaction can realistically land onchain (EIP-7917).
Better predictability for apps and wallets by combining deterministic proposer lookahead (EIP-7917) with the new eth_config JSON-RPC method (EIP-7910), which lets clients query the current and next fork configuration—including the blob schedule—directly from nodes.
Account flows that match mainstream expectations as passkey-based authentication plugs into account abstraction and wallet UX, enabling multi-factor, device-native login patterns that feel like modern applications rather than crypto-specific rituals (EIP-7951).
This is a strategic economic decision. User capture strengthens the fee market, a stronger fee market strengthens security, and stronger security reinforces credible decentralization. In Fusaka, UX is pulled into that economic loop instead of being treated as an afterthought at the edges, making user experience a first-class part of Ethereum’s value story rather than an optional layer.
Conclusion: Fusaka Re-asserts Ethereum’s Dominance
When you place these three pillars side by side, Fusaka looks less like a maintenance fork and more like Ethereum re-asserting itself as the dominant settlement layer. It is designing a system where many different parties can still participate, where ETH reliably accrues value as usage grows, and where users have a reason to choose Ethereum because the experience is competitive with anything else on the market.
Fusaka hard-codes that stance into the protocol. It keeps validation viable for ordinary operators, it prices data and computation so the network is not quietly subsidizing everyone else, and it pushes UX improvements down into the base layer instead of leaving them entirely to wallets. In doing so, it shifts Ethereum from reacting to individual problems to running on clear, rule-based policy.
That is what makes Fusaka Ethereum’s first value-aware hard fork: it aligns participation, value accrual, and user capture in one upgrade, and it sets the expectation that future forks will be judged on whether they strengthen that alignment. Covalent supporters Fusaka and Ethereum scaling by providing access to historical and real-time Ethereum data and blobs through GoldRush.
