From Pectra to Fusaka: How Ethereum Expands Its Moat Through "Pipeline Upgrades"?

Pectra itself is not the “turning point for modular data availability (DA)”; it is the final key piece that allows L2 to attract mainstream users while Ethereum maintains its settlement dominance.

Written by: OKX

Key Points

• Pectra (Prague + Electra) is the largest hard fork bundled upgrade since The Merge, containing 11 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP), aimed at synchronously reducing data costs, simplifying smart account operations, and optimizing validator operations.
• EIP-7691 doubles the Blob target capacity to 6 and raises the hard cap to 9. This reduces the Gas fees for L1 data availability (DA) to around 1 Gwei or less, and the exchange fees on major L2s have also briefly dropped to around 02 dollars or less.
• Now, each externally owned account (EOA) can be converted into a smart account through a single transaction (EIP-7702), enabling Gas fee sponsorship, stablecoin payment of fees, and bulk user experience without the need for contract migration.
• The validator cap has been raised to 2,048 ETH (EIP-7251), significantly reducing DevOps costs for large operators without significantly affecting decentralization.
• PeerDAS will be the next step in the Fusaka upgrade, and its importance to Roll-up far exceeds that of any single EIP in Pectra.

OKX Ventures’ perspective: Pectra itself is not the “turning point for modular data availability (DA)”; it is the last key piece that allows L2 to attract mainstream users while Ethereum maintains its settlement dominance. The future winners will be those who (a) externalize all user experience friction through 7702-style accounts, (b) leverage the benefits of Blob to drive new data-intensive verticals (on-chain AI, order book DEX, content storage), and © double down on proof compression technology stacks before PeerDAS.

OKX Ventures held a Twitter Space event on May 13, inviting guests who directly participated in code writing or infrastructure operation after the fork to discuss these changes in depth.

In this event, OKX Ventures conducted a detailed examination of these changes with those who must deliver code or operate hardware after the fork goes live:

• 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

1. In the first week, who changed direction and who felt the shockwave?

Arbitrum – Derek doesn’t need to rewrite any code, but each Arbitrum instance must upgrade its embedded Geth client. The only EIP he truly cares about is 7691: Doubling the blob target capacity means that DEX and gaming users will have more low-fee space.

Pectra Progress Update:

• BoLD’s permissionless fraud proof entered the testnet in April and is planned to launch on the mainnet “before the fourth quarter.”
• Stylus compiles hundreds of Rust/C contracts every day—llama.cpp inference and real-time chess engine are examples showcased by Derek.
• TimeBoost has replaced the “first-price auction” mechanism in the Arbitrum sorter memory pool, enhancing the fairness of transaction inclusion.

Starknet – LeoPectra has primarily tweaked Starknet’s Blob cost model; The fee schedule for Cairo 1.x remains the same. The bigger shift lies in StarkWare’s own roadmap: the reduction in the cost of L1 data availability (DA) has diminished the urgency of “volition” (i.e., selective off-chain data) and redirected attention to stateless client research.

Decentralized Milestone:

• Staking v2 (based on block reward proof) will be released this quarter.
• Sorter as a Service (14) - a 3f + 1 Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) cluster - will be launched in 2025; cheaper Blobs may allow them to shorten the proof generation cycle without increasing costs.

EthStorage – Qi Zhou A higher Blob activity is a boon – his storage layer now plans to provide ongoing incentives when data is discarded on Ethereum in two weeks. Pectra also enforced a full fleet Geth upgrade; an operator group using version v1.13.8 froze in the mid-epoch.

Shockwave:

• Node operators: Within 48 hours, 732 validators will increase their staked amount to over 32 Ether.
• Roll-up users: As Blob Gas fees fall back to around 1 Gwei, the exchange fees on major L2s drop to below two cents, despite fluctuations in the memory pool.
• Infrastructure Developers: The rapid release of the Go-Ethereum point version keeps all developers running archive nodes on high alert.

OKX Ventures Insight: Cheap Blobs, disposable accounts, and larger validators are not the headline features; they are the foundational “pipelines” that enable the next headline feature to roll out smoothly. PeerDAS will soon validate this assertion.

2. In-depth Analysis of EIP

Scaled Smart Accounts (EIP-7702)

EIP-7702 allows any externally owned account (EOA) to behave as a smart account in a single transaction, inheriting batch calling, Gas sponsorship, and stablecoin payment functionalities without the need for contract migration.

Starknet has been in the AA (Account Abstraction) world since the genesis block. Leo illustrates this with an example: the productivity application FocusTree silently deploys an account for each mobile user and starts minting achievement NFTs supported by sponsorship fees. Users are not even aware that they are operating on-chain.

EthStorage will use pay-masters to fund the first ten transactions for users - for example, deploying a personal website with one click via Blob.

Arbitrum has integrated the 7702 process through third-party AA providers with GMX, Camelot, and Plays. Derek expects the first direct indicators of improvement to be the trading success rate and failed exchange refunds, followed by a second wave of native Web2 user import channels.

OKX Ventures’ perspective: 7702 eliminates the final self-custody user experience barrier. Investable areas are those payers that conduct Gas arbitrage across different tokens and chains, as well as secure middleware that enforces spending limits and fraud rules at the AA layer.

Cheaper data (EIP-7691)

Arbitrum: Each Roll-up competes for the same Blob pool; doubling the capacity only “provides breathing space before congestion pricing takes effect.”

Starknet only released state differences; cheaper Blobs did not unlock new features but reduced the total cost per transaction and helped avoid a shift to “voluntary selection” (selective off-chain data).

EthStorage estimates that the new capacity (approximately 3 TB every 12 days) finally makes it possible to fully store static websites smaller than 100 MB— including vitalik.ca— in the Blob. It is important to note that the Gas fees for on-chain transactions are now a bottleneck, typically exceeding the long-term storage costs. Qi is pushing for block-level access lists and higher Gas limits to alleviate this constraint.

OKX Ventures Perspective: The focus of data is shifting back to on-chain; the recent potential market (TAM) is non-financial Blob-native content (AI inference weights, game assets, social graphs), which can tolerate Blob expiration if retrieval incentives are present. Long-term tail retrieval and proof markets will become key infrastructure.

Validator limit 2,048 Ether (EIP-7251)

Data point: So far, only 732 out of 1,000,000 validators have increased their staking amount - there has been no sign of centralized panic.

Arbitrum & Starknet: Pure Operational Victory - Lower DevOps Costs, Minimal Impact on Users. Theoretically, the penalty risk for each validator has increased, but Leo considers this an “interesting academic question” rather than a practical obstacle.

EthStorage: Allows running hot/cold validator replicas without increasing infrastructure costs; makes large-scale Blob proofs more reliable. Qi emphasized the operational advantages of staking services: fewer devices, the same yield, and running hot backup validators without a double hardware budget.

OKX Ventures Insight: Cost savings in hardware will flow into restaking and shared security markets, rather than directly to end users; protocols in the style of EigenLayer will absorb released liquidity. More idle ETH → More security capacity.

3. Pectra Post-Roadmap Signals

PeerDAS (Fusaka Hard Fork, EIP-7623)

Every speaker used the same adjective: existential. Derek referred to it as “critical and non-negotiable”—Offchain Labs has had Prism engineers involved in the specification discussions because the fraud proof throughput of Arbitrum is ultimately limited by DA bandwidth. Leo sees PeerDAS as “the foundation of the entire L2 roadmap”; once sampling goes live, he can increase the proof frequency of Starknet without worrying about Blob fees. Qi has already written the economic foundation for that world—EthStorage will pay incentives to peers to maintain their availability after the protocol forgets the sampled Blob.

Verkle Tree and Historical Data Expiration

Qi sees the two paths as complementary. The Verkle tree reduces the witness data size and enables stateless clients; Historical data expiration reduces the disk space of a full node by half by discarding old blocks. He estimates that about 50% of the storage space can be saved, but this is limited to the existence of a retrieval market – Portal + EthStorage – that pays someone to keep the cold data. Leo cares less about saving and more about what the Verkle tree unlocks: a phone that can verify Ethereum without synchronizing. He wanted to see how the Beacon client handled stateless patterns before porting that idea to Starknet.

SSZ Object Transaction ( EIP-6404 Series )

Qi is currently leading the first public testnet. Its promises are: smaller witness data, faster decoding, and perfect alignment with the Verkle tree object hash model. Derek currently holds an agnostic attitude (“Roll-up can absorb any format”), while Starknet is just monitoring - Cairo has already been serialized with its own field element layout.

Contract Size 128 KB (EIP-7907)

If you have ever split a monolithic application into 24 KB fragments, you will understand the pain involved. The development teams of Qi and Curve are leading this patch, but the obstacle is not consensus—rather, it is the need for a DDoS-resistant Gas meter for very large deployment transactions.

Block-level Access List

The benchmark tests of Qi show that parallel preloading can reduce Geth’s IO wait time by about 70%. This, in turn, validates the reasonableness of increasing the Gas limit, thereby directly lowering the cost of Blob issuance. He is collecting mainnet tracking 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 provide developers with the space to deploy large, complex contracts without compromise.

Four, Macroscopic Picture - How Will All This Expand the Moat?

The core metric to watch out for is the settled value. Leo expects the compound growth curve of L2 throughput to outperform all other key performance indicators (KPIs), and he believes that “each roll-up will lead to exponential growth in its own right.” If this is true, then the settlement layer to which all these L2s are anchored – Ethereum – will capture the entire flywheel effect.

The developer retention rate now seems to be finally trending towards health. The litmus test for Qi is the experience of the Web2 team with the AA wallet and subsidized Blob—both of which did not exist in a credible form six months ago.

The security budget is about to be repriced. Derek pointed out that the integration of validators along with a re-staking mechanism similar to EigenLayer will shift the yield from idle staking to active validation services. Ether that was previously idle in personal 32 ETH hot wallets is now transforming into remote proof income for oracles, bridges, and DSPs.

Is Pectra a “fulcrum”? This statement is somewhat biased. The group members unanimously believe that even if the Blob utilization is only 40%, large Roll-ups will not turn to Celestia or EigenDA. Ethereum’s data availability (DA) is still the most cost-effective trust premium in the crypto space. Continuously expanding the base layer, the delegated market will resolve the remaining issues on its own.

Derek’s core point is: “It’s not a complete shift, but rather an increased investment, dedicated to enhancing the speed of Ethereum and ensuring the comfort of Roll-up.”

Qi added: The killer-level user experience upgrade will first be prototyped on L1 - 7702 is already so, and the PeerDAS sampling will also follow this path - and then cascade down to L2.

OKX Ventures’ perspective: The synergy between a highly modular Roll-up stack and the continuously expanding L1 capacity curve creates a flywheel that no single chain can rival. Pectra did not “save Ethereum”; it merely cleared the last user experience gap before PeerDAS increased DA by 25 times.

V. Hot Topics: Is Pectra “sufficient”?

Roll-up’s DA choice: unanimously no - Arbitrum, Starknet, and EthStorage do not plan to shift to external DA, even if Blob utilization remains below 60%.

Non-technical leverage: Derek believes that attention should continue to be paid to L1 scaling and Roll-up support; there is no need for issuance game theory. Qi stated that L1 scaling experiments (block-level access lists, larger Gas limits) will originate from Ethereum and be back-propagated to L2.

6. OKX Ventures Future Investment Strategy

The smart account infrastructure will become the default consumer entry point. EIP-7702, combined with third-party payer mechanisms, will compress the two-year gap between crypto-native contract design and large-scale user onboarding. OKX Ventures prioritizes investments in modular payer liquidity networks, intent relays, and AA risk scoring engines, enabling any Web2 application to provide “stablecoin payment for Gas fees” and “one-click registration” features from day one.

Blob native content is the next blank field. The storage incentive layer that ensures Blob retrieval after protocol expiration is very promising. Cheap Blobs combined with the storage incentive layer will create a medium where games, AI models, and social media can be fully built on Ethereum’s security.

Re-staking will absorb the funds saved by validators. EIP-7251 releases the hardware budget and activates idle Ether. Protocols that can convert these collateral into measurable security—such as oracle proofs, bridge validation, and shared sequencer sets—will gain excess returns. OKX Ventures expects that “investment-grade” re-staking targets will become scarce and is actively funding teams with the clearest risk-adjusted accounting.

PeerDAS is the real turning point. When sampling DA is implemented, Roll-up can dilute the marginal DA cost by 10 times without relinquishing trust in Ethereum. Teams currently building data sampling clients, proof compression circuits, or DA market will master the core tooling layer after the activation of Fusaka. OKX Ventures is actively seeking projects that can take the lead in the tools, proof compression, and data availability market for Fusaka.