Ethereum’s Coming of Age: Ruthless Rent Collection and Dimensional Breakthrough

Written by: Oliver, Mars Finance

Data can sometimes be misleading, especially when the base is extremely small. But the trend behind the data never lies.

On December 4th, within 24 hours of the Ethereum Fusaka upgrade going live, an on-chain signal appeared that was enough to panic outsiders and make insiders ponder: the Blob Base Fee skyrocketed from the original 1 wei straight up to around 15 million wei, peaking close to 20 million wei.

A 15-million-fold surge.

If this happened in traditional financial markets, such a sharp rise in costs would typically signal hyperinflation or system collapse. But in the crypto world, this is a long-overdue return to value—one could even call it a “correction of course.”

If the previous Dencun upgrade was Ethereum’s “subsidized price cut” to retain L2s, then post-Fusaka, Ethereum has finally torn off the warm facade and started to operate like a mature commercial bank. This is not just a technical parameter adjustment; it’s a carefully orchestrated “dual-front strategy”: On the B2B side, it ends the free lunch for L2s and initiates a brutal survival-of-the-fittest. On the B2C side, by supporting standard hardware, it quietly activates hundreds of millions of potential hardware wallets lying dormant in your pocket.

Ending the Tragedy of the Commons: From “Freeloading” to “Paying” the Economic Bill

This 15-million-fold surge happened because the previous price was fundamentally wrong.

Before Fusaka, the Blob market was in a primitive pricing state—lacking any floor price mechanism. As long as the network wasn’t fully congested, the cost for L2s to submit data to the mainnet was just 1 wei (about 0.000000001 Gwei).

This absurd pricing led to a classic “tragedy of the commons”: Ethereum mainnet nodes bore real physical costs for storage, bandwidth, and KZG proof verification (computing power and electricity) but received almost no reward. L2s, aiming to save costs, crammed all their data (including large amounts of spam and wash trades) into Blobs because it was virtually free. L1 was, in effect, subsidizing the wild growth of L2s.

The core proposal of the Fusaka upgrade, EIP-7918, is essentially an administrative order, setting an insurmountable “minimum wage” for Blob resources.

According to the new algorithm, Blob Base Fee can no longer fall to dust levels and is now forcibly anchored at 1/15.258 of the L1 execution layer Base Fee. This is a smart design: it links the Blob price to Ethereum mainnet’s real activity (that is, real value).

This perfectly explains the astonishing surge: the previous price was not only cheap but unsustainably free. The new price (about 0.01-0.5 Gwei) is still low, but enough to cover node physical costs and effectively curb the abuse of spam data.

For ETH’s economic model, this also completes the final missing piece.

In the past, investors often criticized L2s for “vampirizing” Ethereum—taking away transaction volume while contributing little to ETH burning. With EIP-7918, fees have normalized, and with exponential L2 growth expected in the future, Blobs will shift from being merely a scaling tool to a new driver of ETH deflation. According to estimates by institutions like Bitwise, this mechanism could account for 30% to 50% of total ETH burned by 2026. This is a huge hidden income, shifting from L2 project teams’ profit statements back into ETH holders’ pockets.

Farewell to the “Manchild” Era: Vitalik’s Ultimatum

Beyond economic calculations, the Fusaka upgrade sends a deeper political signal: Ethereum is withdrawing its indulgence of L2s.

Over the past two years, Ethereum has adopted a “let a hundred flowers bloom” strategy for L2s. As long as you’re called a Rollup, you get extremely cheap block space. This tolerance led to a flood of L2 projects—countless teams forked code and used centralized sequencers, issuing tokens under the banner of “scaling” to raise money, but in reality stayed stuck at what Vitalik defined as “Stage 0” (i.e., security completely dependent on multisig, not code logic—like “riding with training wheels”).

On the eve of Fusaka, Vitalik Buterin subtly but decisively shifted his tone. He drew a clear line: if an L2 can’t reach “Stage 1” soon (i.e., has effective, permissionless fraud proofs or validity proofs), it doesn’t deserve to be called a Rollup.

The Blob fee surge in Fusaka is essentially L1 refusing to subsidize these low-quality L2s anymore.

This means 2025 will be the year of the “L2 Battle Royale.” Those without real users or revenue, sustained only by VC funding—these “zombie L2s”—will face a double blow:

Cost side: Rising Blob fees will cause operational costs to skyrocket, making it impossible to fake prosperity through wash trading.

Narrative side: As the Ethereum Foundation tightens definitions, they’ll lose their “Layer 2” legitimacy.

The future is clear: only technically robust, genuinely active top L2s will survive—the rest will be mercilessly crushed by the wheels of history.

Trojan Horse: The Activated iPhone and the Downshifted Hardware Wallet

If EIP-7918 is about making Ethereum more money, then EIP-7951 is about bringing Ethereum more people.

For a long time, Web3 mass adoption faced a dilemma:

For security: you had to spend hundreds of dollars on a dedicated hardware wallet like Ledger or OneKey, and guard your seed phrase like a nuclear code.

For convenience: you had to entrust your assets to centralized exchanges, always fearing the next FTX collapse.

In reality, everyone has a top-tier hardware wallet in their pocket. Whether it’s the iPhone’s Secure Enclave or Android’s TrustZone, both have built-in military-grade secure chips (TEE). Their security is on par with the cold wallets on the market.

The awkward part is, these chips use the NIST standard secp256r1 curve, while Ethereum (inherited from Bitcoin) uses secp256k1. This tiny difference in letter means a massive mathematical gap—phone chips, when facing Ethereum, are like foreigners who don’t speak the language and can’t sign directly.

The Fusaka upgrade, through EIP-7951, introduces a precompiled contract, opening a “green channel” at the EVM base layer. Developers now only need to pay 6,900 Gas to natively verify an r1 signature from a phone chip.

The impact is nuclear—it completely reshapes wallet product logic: future users won’t need to know what a private key is, nor face the stress of writing down 12 words. All you need to do is scan your face or fingerprint like buying coffee—your iPhone’s secure chip will directly sign the transaction. This gives you the hardware-level security of physical isolation (private keys never leave the chip) and the seamless Web2 experience.

For Ledgers and similar products, this could be a dimensionality-reduction blow; but for the Ethereum ecosystem, it’s the only path to seamlessly onboard a billion new users.

The End of Fragmentation and the “Ethereum Empire” B2B Endgame

Beyond the above, the Fusaka upgrade also hints at Ethereum’s endgame: complete B2B-ification.

Currently, the Ethereum ecosystem is much like 19th-century Europe—hundreds of L2s are like hundreds of small principalities, all recognizing Ethereum as royalty, but with fragmented liquidity and abysmal user experience.

To solve this, the community is championing “Based Rollups” (L1-sequenced Rollups). Unlike current L2s (which have their own sequencers and function as independent kingdoms), Based Rollups return transaction sequencing power to Ethereum L1 validators.

This is a bold “centralization” strategy. It means L2s will no longer be isolated networks, but more like extensions of Ethereum L1.

Combined with Fusaka’s new cost structure, the future Ethereum L1 will evolve into a pure “global settlement layer.” Its direct clients will be just two types:

L2 networks: wholesalers, buying block space (Blobs) from L1 and retailing it to users.

Financial institutions and whales: using EIP-7951-enabled hardware security for final settlement of large assets.

This is Ethereum’s “coming of age ceremony”: it is no longer a geek experiment sacrificing business logic for decentralization, but a strict, hierarchical, and now rent-extracting digital financial empire.

Investor Survival Guide (Investor Survival Guide)

In the face of the Fusaka upgrade’s upheaval, ordinary investors can’t just be bystanders. The rules have changed—your investment strategy must evolve too.

1. Advice for ETH “perma-bulls”: Deflation logic restored, but beware of L2 narrative traps

Bullish side: The Blob fee surge is a real positive. This means ETH burning no longer depends solely on mainnet high Gas; for the first time, L2 prosperity truly translates into ETH deflation. Long-term, ETH is shifting from a “governance token” to the “land of the internet,” with rising rental yields.

Risk: Beware of new forms of the “L2 vampire” theory. While L1 is now collecting rent, if lots of fake L2s create fake prosperity, it’s still unsustainable.

Strategy: Focus on the ETH/BTC ratio. Fusaka fixes Ethereum’s fundamental flaw. If you’re a long-termist, now is the time to reassess Ethereum’s allocation value, especially while the market is still obsessed with the “Solana killer” narrative—Ethereum is quietly building its moat.

2. Advice for L2 investors: Major purge ahead, apply this “autopsy” checklist

Your L2 tokens may go to zero. Immediately review your holdings with these three criteria:

Standard A: Has it reached Stage 1? Check L2Beat data. If it lacks effective fraud/validity proofs and no clear roadmap, even if it’s a VC darling, avoid it. Vitalik’s patience is gone; the market’s will follow.

Standard B: Is there real revenue? After Blob price hikes, if an L2 still relies on heavy subsidies for low fees and lacks real DeFi or GameFi revenue, its funding will soon run dry. Focus on projects with positive cash flow (Sequencer Revenue > Data Cost).

Standard C: Does it support Based or interoperability? Islands have no future. If an L2 still runs a closed ecosystem and doesn’t support cross-chain atomic swaps or shared sequencers, it will be marginalized.

Conclusion: Abandon “assembled chains” that only exist to issue tokens. Concentrate positions in leading protocols like OP, ARB, Base, ZKSync—those with strong technical moats and real ecosystems.

3. Advice for “interaction hunters” and airdrop chasers: Costs rise, experience upgrades

Bad news: With Blob fee floors in effect, L2 interaction costs (Gas fees) may rise slightly and become more volatile. The days of making tens of thousands of transactions for $0.001 may be gone.

Good news: Account abstraction (AA) wallets are set to boom. Watch closely for next-gen wallet apps supporting EIP-7951 (secp256r1).

Strategy:

Defensive: When L2 Gas spikes (usually during mainnet congestion), avoid unnecessary interactions.

Offensive: Actively try and get involved with smart wallet projects based on Passkey (biometric) technology. This isn’t just an upgrade in experience—it’s a potential goldmine for the next round of alpha (AA wallet airdrops). Future airdrop standards will likely favor real users of AA wallets, filtering out bot farmers.

The Fusaka upgrade is a watershed moment for crypto. It tells us: the free lunch is over, technical compatibility is here, and the industry shakeout has begun. In this transformation, only those who understand the underlying logic will be able to stand firm in the next wave.