The Fusaka upgrade to Ethereum, expected to go live in early December, promises to bring the world’s second-most valuable blockchain into an era of institutional-grade adoption. For far too long, Ethereum has been too slow and too costly to attract meaningful Wall Street business. That could change as Fusaka implements major improvements to how the network verifies and compresses data, increasing its speed and its capacity by 10-fold.
Yet it won’t be easy for Ethereum to maintain its lead among developers as the preferred chain to build on; continued evolution will be essential for Ethereum to preserve its existing edge as a platform for on-chain finance.
Ethereum remains the preferred platform among institutions for asset tokenization, DeFi apps and stablecoin creation, based on strengths that come from its maturity. However, it faces threats that will erode its edge if it doesn’t move to meet the market: like a shark, if Ethereum stops moving, it will die.
Strength: Ethereum uptime
Solana has never quite eclipsed Ethereum, however. A major reason for that may be that over the past five years, Solana, as a blockchain system, has gone dark seven times. Ethereum, as the chief investment officer of Fundstart Capital, Thomas Lee said in August, has never crashed in its 10-year existence. Uptime is prized by financial institutions; it isn’t sexy, but it’s one of the core attributes that make on-chain infrastructure attractive to market participants.
Strength: Ethereum ecosystem maturity
Another unsexy quality institutions will demand: availability and maturity of developer tooling and talent. While Solana attracted the most new developers of any chain last year, Ethereum’s Solidity has the largest developer community, by a wide margin, a lead recently confirmed in a16z’s State of Crypto report.
Risk: Ethereum scaling
An ongoing issue that’s hurt Ethereum is the pace at which it’s scaling, which is to say, sort of glacial. Fusaka will be a major upgrade, but it will still not bring Ethereum and its rollup layers onto the same transactions per second as Solana. In a world where a new GPT seems to come out every other month, Ethereum is long overdue in its goal, stated by its inventor Vitalik Buterin in 2017, to match the scale of transactions on the Visa payment network, and currently nowhere near Visa’s average 24,000 tps. By contrast, Ethereum’s layer-2 (L2) blockchains can process between 1,000 and 10,000 transactions per second.
Risk: Heavyweights & innovators break from Ethereum settlement
New blockchains are increasingly being backed by publicly traded companies, such as Arc from Circle and Tempo by Stripe. Both Arc and Tempo are layer-1 (L1) blockchains, like Ethereum. Instead of building a chain atop Ethereum as an L2 like Coinbase’s Base, Circle and Stripe decided to build their own settlement layer, albeit compatible with the Solidity programming language and the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
Another L1 is Hyperliquid, which is purpose-built as a decentralized exchange for perpetual futures trading. While this may seem niche, Hyperliquid, together with perp DEX Aster, earned 32% of all blockchain revenue in September, according to a VanEck analysis, knocking Solana off its perch. Just as Solana once came to steal Ethereum’s thunder, Hyperliquid seems to be doing the same. And while the crypto flash crash of Oct. 10 shook Hyperliquid and angered many of its traders when winning positions were used to fund losses, it nonetheless survived as designed. All of this must be getting Ethereum devs’ attention, huh?
Ethereum’s path to meet the institutional market
There are plenty of openings for chains like Solana and Hyperliquid to take advantage of Ethereum’s shortcomings. A real race for developer mindshare is underway as the options of well-financed entrants like Circle and Stripe put pressure on Ethereum. Innovation is spread across multiple blockchain ecosystems, and liquidity is following it, creating deep trading pools alongside innovative new protocols. Will Ethereum lose the plot?
To avoid that, there’s a lot of education around Ethereum that needs to be done before it will be fully embraced by mainstream corporate treasurers and the general public. For financial institutions choosing their preferred platforms for tokenization, trading and yield, Ethereum’s human capital may be the ultimate decider. Ethereum’s core of contributors and ecosystem leaders have historically been an idealistic bunch, while also pulling off major upgrades like the Merge without hiccups, and now Fusaka is poised to take the network to the next level. For the health and future of the network, core contributors will need to elevate people who can guide multi-year relationships.
For now, at least, Ethereum is still top of mind as to where institutional infrastructure in crypto is being built. It’s been shown to be vulnerable with its slow pace of scaling, the constant threat of upstart competitors, and it always has Solana and others to keep it in check. If others address the institutional roadmap faster or better, Ethereum risks losing its edge, no matter how high the price of ETH may go.
