Ethereum's Upgrade Broke Everything

TL;DR

Ethereum's Fusaka upgrade collapsed fees by 90%, accidentally making address poisoning attacks so cheap that spam now makes up 22% of all transactions.

Key Points

• 1.Fusaka's miscalculation: Vitalik's 2018 formula predicted a 13–21% fee reduction from doubling the gas limit to 60M units; actual fees dropped over 90%, partly because the formula never accounted for EIP-1559 or Layer 2 solutions like Arbitrum and Base.
• 2.Address poisoning explosion: Since Fusaka, poisoning attacks cost only ~3 cents per attempt. By February 2026, poison transactions reached 22% of all Ethereum transactions, up from 9.5% before the upgrade.
• 3.95% of new wallets are fake: Kulpa Research found that 95% of the increase in active Ethereum wallets since Fusaka were created specifically for dusting and address poisoning scams.
• 4.$50M stolen in just 2 months: Carnegie Mellon researchers found that between December 2025 and January 2026 alone, over $50M was stolen via address poisoning — compared to $83M across the entire prior two-year period studied.
• 5.Broken tokenomics: Collapsed fees gutted ETH's burn mechanism, validator tips fell sharply, staking yields dropped to ~2.7% — below the 4.1% yield of US Treasuries — and ETH is now slightly inflationary at 0.8%.
• 6.Vitalik is selling: The Ethereum Foundation sold over 35,000 ETH (tens of millions of dollars) in early 2026, citing "mild austerity," which the report's authors suggest may signal insider awareness of Fusaka's damage.
• 7.Glamsterdam could make it worse: The next upgrade, planned for early 2026, will raise the gas limit further to 200M units, potentially pushing staking yields even lower and making poison attacks even cheaper to execute.