What Ethereum's Fusaka Upgrade Unlocks, According to Co-Director Tomasz Stańczak

Ethereum’s big Fusaka upgrade isn’t just about cheaper gas or a flashier roadmap. According to Ethereum Foundation co-Executive Director Tomasz Stańczak, it’s about laying the rails for a world where blockchains quietly power almost everything of value.

Speaking with Coinage in a new interview, Stańczak explains why the Fusaka upgrade is important — and why it's a necessary evolution in delivering scaling that ensures Ethereum continues to not only make strides in making Layer-2s more efficient but also Ethereum itself.

“I think the problem was — and perception of many people [was] — that L1 stopped scaling almost,” he said. “We got so excited about the scaling of L2 that we forgot that L1 [Ethereum] should continue just to provide this very credible scaling commitment.”

The most notable change is "PeerDAS," an upgrade that lets validators check smaller slices of data instead of needing to navigate entire “blobs.” That allows for reductions in computation and costs across the board. But as Stańczak stresses, it's just another step in Ethereum's ongoing and iterative process to make improvements, with many more in the roadmap still to come next year.

Ethereum has already gone from $10 gas fees in times of congstion to pocket-change transactions in just a couple years. “I remember last year at Token 2049 in Singapore, when we, for the first time were talking about, oh, we delivered the blobs, and now you can use L2 with a fraction of a cent," Stańczak said.

Stańczak, who assumed his role in March, says he's settling into his role at the Ethereum Foundation. What began as exploring things on the inside has shifted much more into external expectation setting.

“I just used the time to talk to everyone, to go to podcasts, to speak to the media, to be a bit more active on Twitter. And I think that external communication is what people were really hoping for," he said. "And just taking that [tact provided] much more breathing room for the talent at the foundation to execute.”

And yet, in under a year, changes in how the Foundation is helping to drive adoption of Ethereum seem palpable. Not only is Tom Lee leading the charge on Wall Street with his emergence with Bitmine, the Ethereum counterpart to Saylor's Bitcoin digital asset company, but now it seems as if Ethereum has taken back some of the momentum Solana had been mounting last year. As speeds and settlement times converge, other elements of differentiation might matter more — particularly to institutions. But Stańczak stressed it's not the goal to only iterate for that reason.

"Does it mean that everything has to become hyper financialized and tradable? Not necessarily," he said. "But you want to activate whatever people want to trade for whatever reason, and people tend to like to trade a lot of things ... and it's something that I'm very excited will be happening on Ethereum."

Rather than inventing a new marketing slogan, Stańczak explained that he prefers to listen to what the ecosystem actually says it values.

“The approach is go meet everyone and ask them questions about what are you worried about? Why you chose Ethereum? What matters? And when you hear it over and over again, it's like, "Ten years, no downtime.' It matters. Security of Ethereum matters. Decentralization matters, it ... removes counterparty risks and so on," he said.

That alignment is starting to show up in activity. But depending on who you ask in the Ethereum community — it might just not be a question of continued technical improvements to get Ethereum to where it wants to go next. It might take more than that.

During a trip with Coinage to meet with the SEC Crypto Task Force about tokenizing co-ops onchain, ETHDenver founder John Paller made that point, highlighting a flattening innovation curve.

"We've built all the tech that we need. This isn't about some new tool," Paller said back in May. "We have to get serious about real-world adoption. We have to build products and services that people actually want. And we have to give people a means to participate in a simple and easy way."

To get there, Stańczak isn't just thinking about prioritizing speed, or finality times, or simply tokenizing bonds and stocks. He’s already thinking about AI agents natively plugged into Ethereum — and careful not to sacrifice anything that got Ethereum to where it is.

“Protocol neutrality is very important for us, right? So you build protocols so people can express whatever they want to build. And it's not the foundation role to create some kind of moral assessment of what assets are on chain or not," he said. "[We] want to build the system, the network that can have capacity and standards for anything that you want to build on it.”

Put differently: Ethereum’s upgrade isn’t just about cheaper transactions. It’s about turning “digital access to all the assets in the world” into something secure, private, neutral, and fast enough to actually matter — for cypherpunks, for Wall Street, for AI agents, and for whatever comes after.

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