# From Pectra to Fusaka: How Ethereum Extends Its Moat Through "Pipeline Upgrades"

*Pectra is not the "turning point for modular data availability (DA)"; it is the final key piece of the puzzle that enables Layer 2 (L2) to attract mass-market users while Ethereum maintains its dominance in settlement.*

By [Exploring the public blockchain](https://paragraph.com/@discussion-on-encryption-field) · 2025-05-26

pectra, eth

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**Key Points:**  
Pectra (Prague + Electra) is the largest hard-fork bundled upgrade since The Merge, comprising 11 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) aimed at simultaneously reducing data costs, simplifying smart account operations, and optimizing validator operations.  
EIP-7691 doubles the Blob target capacity to six and raises the hard cap to nine. This reduces Layer 1 data availability (DA) gas costs to below approximately 1 Gwei, with swap fees on major L2s briefly dropping below $0.02.  
Now, every externally owned account (EOA) can be converted to a smart account via a single transaction (EIP-7702), enabling gas fee sponsorship, stablecoin payment for fees, and batched user experiences without contract migration.  
The validator cap has been increased to 2,048 ETH (EIP-7251), significantly reducing DevOps costs for large operators without compromising decentralization.  
PeerDAS will be the next step in the Fusaka upgrade, and its importance to roll-ups far exceeds any single EIP in Pectra.

**OKX Ventures' Perspective:** Pectra is not the "turning point for modular data availability (DA)"; it is the final key piece of the puzzle that enables Layer 2 (L2) to attract mass-market users while Ethereum maintains its dominance in settlement. Future winners will be those who (a) externalize all user experience friction through 7702-style accounts, (b) leverage the benefits of Blobs to drive new data-intensive verticals (on-chain AI, order-book DEXs, content storage), and (c) double down on proof compression technology stacks before PeerDAS.

On May 13, OKX Ventures hosted a Twitter Space event, inviting guests who were directly involved in coding or infrastructure operations post-fork to delve into these changes.

During this event, OKX Ventures and those who had to deliver code or run hardware post-fork took a detailed look at these changes:

*   **Derek Lee** – Core Protocol Product Manager at Offchain Labs
    
*   **Leonardo Lerer** – Core Product Manager at StarkWare
    
*   **Qi Zhou** – Co-founder of EthStorage
    
*   **Pok Kopp** – Co-founder of Ether.fi
    
*   **Esme Zheng** – Investor at OKX Ventures
    

**I. Who Changed Direction and Felt the Shockwaves in the First Week?**

*   **Arbitrum** – Derek did not need to rewrite any code, but each Arbitrum instance had to upgrade its embedded Geth client. The only EIP he truly cared about was 7691: Doubling the Blob target capacity means more low-fee space for DEX and gaming users.
    
    **Post-Pectra Progress:**
    
    *   BoLD permissionless fraud proofs entered the testnet in April and are planned to go live on the mainnet "before Q4."
        
    *   Stylus compiles hundreds of Rust/C contracts daily – Derek demonstrated examples like llama.cpp inference and real-time chess engines.
        
    *   TimeBoost has replaced the "first-price auction" mechanism in the Arbitrum sequencer mempool, enhancing transaction inclusion fairness.
        
*   **Starknet** – Pectra mainly adjusted Starknet's Blob cost model; the Cairo 1.x fee schedule remained unchanged. The bigger shift was in StarkWare's own roadmap: The reduction in L1 data availability (DA) costs diminished the urgency for "Volition" (optional off-chain data) and redirected focus back to stateless client research.
    
    **Decentralization Milestones:**
    
    *   Staking v2 (proof-of-block reward) will be released this quarter.
        
    *   Sequencer-as-a-Service (14) – a 3f + 1 Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) cluster – will go live in 2025; cheaper Blobs might allow them to shorten proof generation cycles without increasing fees.
        
*   **EthStorage** – Higher Blob activity is a boon for Qi Zhou's storage layer, which now plans to provide sustained incentives when Ethereum discards data in two weeks. Pectra also enforced a fleet-wide Geth upgrade; a group of operators using version 1.13.8 froze mid-epoch.
    
    **Shockwaves:**
    
    *   **Node Operators:** Within 48 hours, 732 validators increased their stake above 32 ETH.
        
    *   **Roll-up Users:** With Blob gas fees falling back to around 1 Gwei, swap fees on major L2s dropped below two cents, despite mempool volatility.
        
    *   **Infrastructure Developers:** The rapid point release of Go-Ethereum kept all developers running archival nodes on high alert.
        

**OKX Ventures' Perspective:** Cheap Blobs, one-time accounts, and larger validators are not headline features; they are the foundational "pipelines" that enable the next headline feature to land smoothly. PeerDAS will soon validate this assertion.

**II. In-Depth EIP Analysis**

*   **Scalable Smart Accounts (EIP-7702)**  
    EIP-7702 allows any externally owned account (EOA) to behave as a smart account in a single transaction, inheriting batched calls, gas sponsorship, and stablecoin payment capabilities without contract migration.
    
    *   **Starknet** has been in an AA (account abstraction) world since the genesis block. Leo illustrated how productivity app FocusTree silently deployed an account for each mobile user and began minting achievement NFTs supported by sponsored fees, without users even realizing they were operating on-chain.
        
    *   **EthStorage** plans to fund users' first ten transactions using paymasters – for example, deploying a personal website with a single click via Blob.
        
    *   **Arbitrum** already has GMX, Camelot, and Plays integrating the 7702 process through third-party AA providers. Derek expects the first direct metric boost to be transaction success rates and failed swap refunds, followed by a second wave of Web2-native user onboarding channels.
        

**OKX Ventures' Perspective:** EIP-7702 eliminates the final self-custody user experience barrier. Investible areas include payers arbitraging gas across different tokens and chains, as well as security middleware enforcing spending limits and fraud rules on the AA layer.

*   **Cheaper Data (EIP-7691)**
    
    *   **Arbitrum:** Each roll-up competes for the same Blob pool; doubling capacity only provides "breathing room before congestion pricing kicks in."
        
    *   **Starknet:** Only state diffs are published; cheaper Blobs do not unlock new features but reduce the total cost per transaction and help avoid shifting to "Volition" (optional off-chain data).
        
    *   **EthStorage** estimates that the new capacity (approximately 3 TB every 12 days) finally makes it possible to store static websites smaller than 100 MB – including vitalik.ca – entirely in Blobs. Note: On-chain transaction gas costs are now the bottleneck, often exceeding long-term storage costs. Qi is pushing for block-level access lists and higher gas limits to alleviate this constraint.
        

**OKX Ventures' Perspective:** The data focus is shifting back on-chain; the near-term total addressable market (TAM) is non-financial Blob-native content (AI inference weights, gaming assets, social graphs) that can tolerate Blob expiration if retrieval incentives exist. Long-term tail retrieval and proof markets will become key infrastructure.

*   **Validator Cap at 2,048 ETH (EIP-7251)**
    
    *   **Data Point:** Only 732 out of 1,000,000 validators have increased their stake so far – no centralization panic.
        
    *   **Arbitrum & Starknet:** Pure operational win – lower DevOps costs with minimal impact on users. Theoretically, the slashing risk per validator increases, but Leo considers it an "interesting academic question" rather than a practical barrier.
        
    *   **EthStorage:** Allows running hot/cold validator replicas without additional infrastructure spending; makes large-scale Blob proofs more reliable. Qi emphasized the operational advantages of staking services: fewer devices, same rewards, and running hot standby validators without a double hardware budget.
        

**OKX Ventures' Insight:** Hardware cost savings will flow into re-staking and shared security markets, not directly to end-users; watch for EigenLayer-style protocols to absorb the released liquidity. More idle ETH → more security capacity.

**III. Post-Pectra Roadmap Signals**

*   **PeerDAS (Fusaka Hard Fork, EIP-7623)**  
    Every speaker used the same adjective: existential. Derek called it "crucial and non-negotiable" – Offchain Labs already has Prism engineers involved in the specification discussions because Arbitrum's fraud proof throughput is ultimately limited by DA bandwidth. Leo sees PeerDAS as "the foundation of the entire L2 roadmap"; once sampling goes live, he can increase Starknet's proof frequency without worrying about Blob costs. Qi has already written the economic basis for that world – EthStorage will pay incentives to peers to maintain availability after the protocol forgets sampled Blobs.
    
*   **Verkle Trees and Historical Data Expiry**  
    Qi believes these two paths are complementary. Verkle trees reduce witness data size and enable stateless clients; historical data expiry reduces full node disk space by half by discarding old blocks. He estimates about 50% storage savings, but only if there is a retrieval market – Portal + EthStorage – paying someone to keep cold data. Leo is less concerned with savings and more with the functionality unlocked by Verkle trees: a phone that can verify Ethereum without syncing state. He wants to observe how Beacon clients handle stateless mode before transplanting the idea to Starknet.
    
*   **SSZ Object Transactions (EIP-6404 Series)**  
    Qi is leading the first public testnet. The promise is smaller witness data, faster decoding, and perfect alignment with the Verkle tree object hash model. Derek is currently agnostic ("Roll-ups can absorb any format"), while Starknet is just monitoring – Cairo already serializes with its own field element layout.
    
*   **Contract Size at 128 KB (EIP-7907)**  
    If you've ever split a monolithic application into 24 KB fragments, you'll understand the pain. Qi and the Curve development team are leading this patch, but the blocker is not consensus – it's the need for a DDoS-resistant gas meter for very large deployment transactions.
    
*   **Block-Level Access Lists**  
    Qi's benchmarks show that parallel preloading of state can reduce Geth's IO wait time by about 70%. This, in turn, justifies increasing the gas limit, directly reducing Blob publication costs. He is collecting mainnet trace data to prove this trade-off.
    

**OKX Ventures' Insight:** Pectra is a "comfortable" release; the next twelve months will focus on data availability, stateless validation, and ultimately providing space for developers to deploy large, complex contracts without workarounds.

**IV. Macro Picture – How Will All This Widen the Moat?**

The core metric to watch is settled value. Leo expects the compound growth curve of L2 throughput to outpace all other key performance indicators (KPIs), stating, "Every roll-up will bring its own exponential growth." If this holds true, then the settlement layer to which all these L2s are anchored – Ethereum – will capture the entire flywheel effect.

Developer retention finally appears to be trending healthy. Qi's litmus test lies in Web2 teams' trials of AA wallets and sponsored Blobs – neither of which existed in a credible form six months ago.

The security budget is about to be repriced. Derek pointed out that validator consolidation, coupled with EigenLayer-like re-staking mechanisms, will shift returns from idle staking to active validation services. Ether once idling in individual 32 ETH hot wallets is transforming into remote proof income for oracles, bridges, and DSPs.

Is Pectra the "fulcrum"? This claim is somewhat overstated. The panelists unanimously agreed that even with Blob utilization at just 40%, large roll-ups will not switch to Celestia or EigenDA. Ethereum's **data availability (DA)** remains the most cost-effective trust premium in crypto. By continuously expanding the base layer, the market will solve the rest of the problems on its own.

Derek's core argument is: "It's not a complete switch, but a doubling down on improving Ethereum's speed and ensuring roll-up comfort."

Qi added that killer user experience upgrades will still be prototyped on L1 first – as was the case with 7702, and PeerDAS sampling will follow the same path – before cascading down to L2.

**OKX Ventures' Perspective:** The synergy between highly modular roll-up stacks and the continuously expanding L1 capacity curve forms a flywheel that no monolithic chain can match. Pectra did not "save Ethereum"; it merely cleared the last user experience gap before PeerDAS can boost DA by 25 times.

**V. Hot Topic: Is Pectra "Enough"?**

*   **Roll-up DA Choices:** Consensus is no – neither Arbitrum, Starknet, nor EthStorage plans to switch to external DA, even if Blob utilization remains below 60%.
    
*   **Non-Technical Leverage:** Derek believes that continuous focus on L1 scaling and roll-up support is needed; there is no need for issuance games. Qi noted that L1 scaling experiments (block-level access lists, larger gas limits) will originate from Ethereum and propagate back to L2.
    

**VI. OKX Ventures' Future Investment Strategy**

*   **Smart Account Infrastructure:** This will become the default consumer entry point. Combining EIP-7702 with third-party payer mechanisms will compress the two-year gap between crypto-native contract design and mass user onboarding. OKX Ventures prioritizes investments in modular payer liquidity networks, intent relays, and AA risk scoring engines that enable any Web2 application to offer "stablecoin payment for gas fees" and "one-click registration" from day one.
    
*   **Blob-Native Content:** The storage incentive layer that guarantees Blob retrieval after protocol expiration is highly promising. Cheap Blobs combined with a storage incentive layer will create a medium where games, AI models, and social media can be fully built on top of Ethereum's security.
    
*   **Re-Staking:** This will absorb the funds saved by validators. EIP-7251 frees up hardware budgets and activates idle ether. Protocols that can transform this collateral into measurable security – such as oracle proofs, bridge validation, shared sequencer sets – will earn excess returns. OKX Ventures expects "investment-grade" re-staking targets to become scarce and is actively funding teams with the clearest risk-adjusted accounting.
    
*   **PeerDAS as the True Turning Point:** When sampling DA lands, roll-ups can dilute marginal DA costs by ten times without giving up Ethereum's trust. Teams currently building data sampling clients, proof compression circuits, or DA markets will hold the core tooling layer after Fusaka activation. OKX Ventures is actively seeking out projects that can get ahead of Fusaka in tools, proof compression, and data availability markets.

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*Originally published on [Exploring the public blockchain](https://paragraph.com/@discussion-on-encryption-field/from-pectra-to-fusaka-how-ethereum-extends-its-moat-through-pipeline-upgrades)*
