Ethereum's 'Fusaka' Era: Has the Jan 2026 Upgrade Finally Made ETH 'Ultrasound' Again?
Khushi V Rangdhol Jan 21, 2026 05:22
Following the mainnet activation on December 3, 2025, the Ethereum network entered its final phase of the Fusaka upgrade on January 7, 2026. By introducing a revolutionary "Blob Parameter Only" (BPO) mechanism and a minimum fee floor, Fusaka has successfully stabilized the fee market. While the "ultrasound" (deflationary) status is no longer a constant, the January 2026 data confirms that ETH has returned to a "Micro-Deflationary" cycle even during periods of low activity.
In 2024 and 2025, Ethereum faced an identity crisis. The "Dencun" upgrade made Layer 2s so cheap that the burn rate plummeted, causing ETH supply to turn inflationary for the first time since the Merge. Critics claimed "Ultrasound Money" was dead.
The Fusaka Upgrade (named after the city of Osaka and the star Fulu) was designed specifically to fix this "Success Paradox." By the completion of the BPO-2 fork in early January 2026, the results are clear: Ethereum has found a new economic equilibrium.
1. The January 7 BPO-2: Opening the Data Floodgates
The final piece of the Fusaka puzzle was the BPO-2 (Blob Parameter Only) fork on January 7, 2026. Unlike previous upgrades that required months of coordination, BPO allows the network to "tune" its capacity like a radio dial.
- New Capacity: The target blob count was raised to 14 per block, with a maximum ceiling of 21.
- The Result: This 8x increase in data availability has enabled Layer 2s (like Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism) to support over 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) across the ecosystem.
2. EIP-7918: The "Burn Floor" That Saved the Narrative
The most critical economic change in Jan 2026 wasn't the speed—it was EIP-7918. Previously, if L2 demand was low, blob fees would drop to near zero, meaning no ETH was burned. EIP-7918 introduced a Reserve Price Floor that ties blob fees to execution layer costs.
- Pre-Fusaka: On 93% of days in 2025, blob fees were effectively zero.
- Post-Fusaka (Jan 2026): Even with the massive increase in supply, the "Burn Floor" ensures that L2s are always contributing to the ETH burn. In the first three weeks of January, this generated an estimated 8x increase in burnt blob fees compared to the same period in 2025.
3. PeerDAS: Scaling Without Centralization
A major fear in 2025 was that increasing blobs would make Ethereum nodes too expensive for regular people to run. Fusaka solved this with PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling). Instead of every node downloading all 21 blobs, nodes now "sample" small chunks of data from each other.
- Bandwidth Savings: This reduced the data load on home validators by 87.5%.
- Impact: It allowed Ethereum to scale its "broadband" capacity without forcing solo stakers to move their hardware into industrial data centers.
4. Is ETH "Ultrasound" Again?
As of February 2026, the answer is a nuanced "Yes, but different."
- The New Normal: ETH is no longer "always deflationary." Instead, it is Elastic.
- High Activity: During market surges, the combined burn from L1 transactions and the new L2 "Burn Floor" makes ETH aggressively deflationary.
- Low Activity: The BPO mechanism ensures the supply remains flat or only mildly inflationary (+0.1%), preventing the "inflationary death spiral" feared in 2025.
"Fusaka didn't just make Ethereum faster; it made the 'Ultrasound' narrative sustainable. We stopped waiting for a miracle and built a floor." — Ethereum Core Dev, Jan 2026
Sources: MEXC News: Ethereum 2026 Outlook - Fusaka and ETHB, Crypto.com Research: Fusaka Upgrade Nov-Dec 2025, Bankless: Breaking Down Ethereum's Fusaka Upgrade, Consensys: Everything You Need to Know About Fusaka, Fidelity Digital Assets: The Fusaka Upgrade - Scaling Meets Value Accrual
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