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Ethereum’s Fusaka Upgrade Signals New Era for Value Accrual: Fidelity Digital Assets
The upgrade marks a sharper strategic turn for the blockchain, aligning protocol development with economic intent and strengthening the case for ether.
Nov 20, 2025, 4:18 p.m.
What to know:
- Fidelity Digital Assets said Fusaka reflects Ethereum’s most cohesive, value-driven roadmap to date.
- The upgrade reinforces layer-1 scaling and could reshape layer-2 economics in ways that benefit ether holders.
- Investors should watch the trade-offs as the blockchain leans more directly into monetization and pricing power, the report said.
Fidelity Digital Assets said the Ethereum blockchain’s Fusaka upgrade marks a decisive shift toward a more strategically aligned and economically coherent roadmap.
Fusaka, a blend of the names Fulu and Osaka, comprises two simultaneous changes to Ethereum’s consensus and execution layers, and is expected to happen in December.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
For years, Ethereum’s development path has been shaped by a wide, and sometimes competing, set of stakeholder priorities, Fidelity Digital Assets said in the Thursday report.
Fusaka represents a break from that pattern, analyst Max Wadington wrote, consolidating around a narrower set of goals that more directly reinforce scalability, usability and, increasingly, value accrual to ether itself.
The analyst framed this moment as a maturation in Ethereum’s governance. A move from loosely coordinated upgrades to a roadmap guided by clearer economic intent.
Wadington noted that while value accrual isn’t explicitly named as a core objective, it has become the shared incentive uniting developers, users and investors. That alignment is now showing up in protocol-level decisions, particularly in the renewed emphasis on layer-1 scaling, which could strengthen pricing power and expand the platform’s revenue-generating potential.
The report also highlighted early signs of a shifting layer-2 landscape, one that may eventually push more economic activity, and thus more revenue, back to the base layer.
That dynamic could reinforce ether's position as a cash-flowing asset, but the report cautioned that these moves come with trade-offs, especially around how aggressively the network prioritizes monetization without dampening broader adoption.
A layer-1 network is the base layer, or the underlying infrastructure of a blockchain. Layer 2 refers to a set of off-chain systems or separate blockchains built on top of layer 1s.
Fusaka is less a one-off technical upgrade than a signal of Ethereum’s next phase, a more focused, economically sustainable platform asserting its pricing power and tightening incentive alignment across its ecosystem, the report added.
Read more: The Protocol: Ethereum Developers Target December for Fusaka Hard Fork
AI Disclaimer: Parts of this article were generated with the assistance from AI tools and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and adherence to our standards. For more information, see CoinDesk's full AI Policy.
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