Ethereum’s surprising usage drop suggests the network solved the wrong problem with Fusaka upgrade

Blob fees peaked above $2 million in early 2024 and late 2024 before declining through 2025, with sustained low activity into 2026.What the data reveals about effectiveness

Fusaka succeeded in expanding technical capacity and proving the Blob Parameter Override mechanism works without requiring contentious hard forks.

The reserve price floor appears to be functioning as intended, preventing blob fees from becoming economically meaningless. But utilization lags behind capacity, and reliability at the edges of new capacity shows measurable degradation.

The miss rate curve suggests Ethereum‘s current infrastructure comfortably handles the pre-Fusaka baseline and the first override’s 10/15 parameters, but begins to strain past 16 blobs.

This creates a risk profile: if layer-2 activity surges and pushes blocks toward the 21-blob maximum regularly, the network could face elevated miss rates that compromise finality and reorg resistance.

Demand patterns offer another signal. Median blob usage falling after the first override, despite increased capacity, suggests that layer-2 rollups arent currently constrained by blob availability.

Either their transaction volumes haven‘t grown enough to require more blobs per block, or they’re optimizing compression and batching to fit within existing capacity rather than expanding usage.

Blobscan, a dedicated blob explorer, shows individual rollups posting relatively consistent blob counts over time rather than ramping up to exploit new headroom.

The pre-Fusaka concern was that limited blob capacity would bottleneck Layer 2 scaling and keep rollup fees elevated as networks competed for scarce data availability. Fusaka addressed the capacity constraint, but the bottleneck appears to have shifted.

Rollups aren‘t filling the available space, which means either demand hasn’t arrived yet or other factors, such as sequencer economics, user activity, and cross-rollup fragmentation, are limiting growth more than blob availability was.

What comes next

Ethereums roadmap includes PeerDAS, a more fundamental redesign of data availability sampling that would further expand blob capacity while improving decentralization and security properties.

However, the Fusaka results suggest that raw capacity isnt the binding constraint right now.

The network has room to grow into the 14/21 parameters before needing another expansion, and the reliability curve at high blob counts indicates that infrastructure upgrades may need to catch up before capacity increases again.

The miss rate data provides a clear boundary condition. If Ethereum pushes capacity higher while 16+ blob blocks still show elevated miss rates, it risks introducing systemic instability that could surface during high-demand periods.

The safer path is to let utilization rise toward the current target, monitor whether miss rates improve as clients optimize for higher blob loads, and adjust parameters only once the network demonstrates it can reliably handle edge cases.

Fusaka‘s effectiveness depends on the metric. It expanded capacity successfully and stabilized blob pricing through the reserve floor. It didn’t drive immediate utilization increases or solve the reliability challenges at maximum capacity.

The upgrade created headroom for future growth, but whether that growth materializes remains an open question the data hasnt answered yet.