Ethereum’s Pectra Upgrade Prioritizes Growth Over Fee Capture

In Q2 2025, Ethereum made a decisive bet: scale the network, even if it means giving up short-term fee revenue.

The Pectra hard fork, activated May 7, introduced two key changes:

- EIP-7251 raised the validator cap from 32 to 2048 $ETH → enabling staking consolidation, compounding rewards, and lower network overhead

- EIP-7691 doubled blob capacity → slashed data availability costs for Layer-2s and boosted rollup throughput

The impact?

- 35.500M $ETH now staked (~29.4% of supply)
- Blobs posted daily rose from ~21,300 to ~28,000
- Blob fees hover near $0.000008/day - almost free

This low-cost environment is supercharging rollup margins on @Base, @Arbitrum, and @Optimism, and attracting more builders to L2s.

Ethereum is playing the long game - subsidizing Layer-2 growth to scale sustainably while preserving decentralization at the base layer.

More in our Q2 2025 Wrap-Up: Link in replies