Ethereum’s Fusaka Upgrade Approaches As Tom Lee’s Bitmine Buys $44 Million ETH

The second-biggest blockchain in the crypto space is approaching a crucial moment in its history and development as the much-anticipated Fusaka upgrade is coming in just a few days, on December 3. The official Ethereum X account made an announcement about this earlier this week.

The approaching Fusaka rollout has coincided with another major event – the 12th anniversary of the original Ethereum whitepaper released at the end of 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, where he outlined the main concepts and features of what was to become the foundation of decentralized finance, DAOs, NFTs, and the fast-expanding ecosystem of Layer-2 blockchain protocols.

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Besides, while Bitcoin and Ethereum are heavily down as the crypto market continues to tumble, some financial institutions continue to accumulate ETH and issue bullish forecasts about the ETH price. Among them is the renowned financial analyst, Tom Lee.

Fusaka upgrade just a few days away

Fusaka is expected to be a highly transformative upgrade for Ethereum, and it marks yet another major step towards switching to Ethereum 2.0, which started in September 2022 with The Merger upgrade. Since Ethereum has already transitioned from proof-of-work to the proof-of-stake mining algorithm.

Fusaka will address such important ETH’s technical issues as scalability and the demand of financial institutions that continues to grow exponentially. Besides, the upgrade targets such issues as Ethereum’s efficiency, reducing requirements for nodes, and adding stronger rollup support.

Fusaka will offer Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS). That is a mechanism to allow validators to verify rollup data without actually having to download full blobs. This will result in reducing severe requirements for storage and bandwidth that node operators currently face. Therefore, it can help attract a large number of new participants who will help to run the blockchain platform. Overall, this will also help Ethereum to deal with the increased transaction input and, at the same time, maintain a high level of accessibility, security, and decentralization. This is also likely to attract more institutional investors.

Bitmine buys $44 million in ETH on Ethereum’s 12th anniversary

Meanwhile, despite the current crypto market crash, financial institutions’ interest in Ethereum has seen a drastic increase. One of the major crypto treasury companies, Bitmine, helmed by Fundstrat’s founder Tom Lee, has acquired an impressive $44 million worth of Ethereum. This has marked another large ETH accumulation for the company and brought its total crypto holdings to 3.6 million Ethereum valued at $10.9 billion. This is 14,618 ETH, and it comprises approximately 3% of the total circulating Ethereum supply. This purchase came after Bitmine announced a massive $200 million investment in Ethereum.

Along with this purchase, Tom Lee came forth with a bullish Ethereum outlook, claiming that by January 2026, the second-largest cryptocurrency may surge and trade between $7,000 and $9,000 per coin.

Lee has several times endorsed Ethereum this year, always painting a picture of a bright future for it in terms of the price prospects. He believes that Ethereum is likely to skyrocket in price as it will attract many app developers and institutional investors in the near future, as the platform continues to develop and integrate new upgrades. Besides, Lee recently stated that Ethereum is entering a “supercycle” similar to that started by Bitcoin in 2017. According to the expert, this move for ETH is driven by increasing tokenization of assets, DeFi expansion, and a higher involvement of institutional players. Both Lee and Bitmine seem highly confident in Ethereum’s technical roadmap and the network’s long-term growth and resilience.

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This ultra-bullish announcement came as the Ethereum team and their public leader, Vitalik Buterin, celebrated another anniversary of releasing the ETH whitepaper twelve years ago, in late 2013. That crucial document outlined Buterin’s vision of a network that would support smart contracts, decentralized applications, and the creation of new blockchain platforms with native tokens.

Now, as twelve years have passed, Ethereum holds billions of dollars in total value locked in its DeFi protocols, boasts a wide NFT ecosystem, and its network of layer-2 solutions is expanding in gigantic steps. The majority of altcoins in the market originated on Ethereum and continue to do so. ETH has its own spot ETFs launched after those based on Bitcoin in 2024, and many companies, including the aforementioned Bitmine, are now accumulating it as a reserve asset, stockpiling ETH on their balance sheets for long-term holding.