7 posts tagged with "fulu"

When Ethereum transitioned to proof-of-stake in 2022, the combination of EIP-1559 burning and reduced issuance made the supply actually deflationary during periods of high activity. You'd see charts showing ETH supply shrinking, treasury posts celebrating "ultrasound money," and a widespread assumption that high network usage would keep issuance in check.

That assumption is dead. The data from the last four months makes it clear.

Every blob you add to a block makes it slightly harder for validators to attest to it on time. This isn't a theoretical concern — it shows up in the data today, at the current limit of 6 blobs per block. When Fulu raises that limit, the cost scales with it.

The mechanism is straightforward. The cost of getting it wrong is less obvious.

The blob count limits on Ethereum have always been embedded in the consensus spec. Pre-Fulu, both the target and maximum blobs per block were hardcoded: currently 3 target / 6 max (post-Dencun). Changing them required a hard fork.

EIP-7742 changes that. From Fulu onward, the consensus layer sends the target and max as fields in the ExecutionPayloadHeader. The execution layer reads them and applies them dynamically. No recompile. No fork vote required for the limit itself — only for the mechanism that sets it.

This is a real change to how the blob fee market works.

Two protocol changes hit Ethereum eight days apart in late 2025. The gas limit jumped from 45M to 60M on November 25. Then Fulu — Ethereum's PeerDAS upgrade — activated on December 3. Neither was unexpected. What nobody documented is what happened to MEV builder competition in the weeks that followed.

Builder bid density fell 66%. Proposers earned 30–40% less from MEV-boost during December. The market took seven weeks to recover, and when it did, the recovery was abrupt — not gradual. It happened in a single day.

Every attestation Ethereum's 960,000-odd validators cast has a clock on it. The slot it belongs to ticks past, and then proposers have up to 32 slots to pick it up and include it in a block. Include it in the very next slot and the attester earns a full reward. Wait two slots and the head-vote component — about three-sevenths of the total attestation reward — is already gone.

Most people assume this is a solved problem. Look at the median inclusion delay and you'd agree: it sits at roughly 1.001 slots and barely moves. The typical attestation is included almost immediately.

The median isn't the story.

In December 2025, Ethereum's Fulu upgrade raised the blob cap from 6 to 15, then to 21 in January. That's a 3.5× increase in the data availability space available to rollups per block — the single biggest capacity jump since EIP-4844 launched blobs in March 2024.

Three months later, not a single major rollup has used more than 6 blobs in a single transaction.

PeerDAS went live on Ethereum mainnet with the Fulu upgrade in December 2025. Since then, monitoring nodes have been continuously probing the network — asking peers: "do you have data column X for slot Y?" Over the past seven days, those probes generated 92.5 million responses. And 2.4 million of them came back empty.

Most of that emptiness isn't random. It's concentrated in a specific class of node.