Have you ever watched a market consolidate for what feels like forever, only to explode the moment you look away? That’s exactly where Ethereum feels right now. The price is coiling, dominance is holding its breath, and the biggest network upgrade since The Merge is less than a week away. Something has to give – and most signs point upward.
I’ve been through enough cycles to know that the quiet moments right before major hard forks are usually the most deceptive. Everyone’s exhausted from the correction, sentiment is mixed, and then – boom – the upgrade flips the script. We saw it with Pectra earlier this year. We might be about to see it again with Fusaka.
Why Fusaka Actually Matters This Time
Let’s be honest – not every Ethereum upgrade moves the needle the way people hope. Some are housekeeping. Some are nice-to-haves. But every once in a while, the network drops something that legitimately changes the game. Fusaka, scheduled for December 3, looks like one of those rare moments.
The headline feature? A massive boost to data availability for rollups. If you’ve paid any attention to Layer 2 lately, you know this is the single biggest bottleneck holding back real scaling right now. More data blobs mean cheaper transactions on Arbitrum, Optimism, Base – all of them. And cheaper transactions mean more users, more activity, more fees burned, and ultimately a stronger Ethereum.
It’s not sexy on paper, but in practice it’s rocket fuel.
The Pectra Playbook Is Still Fresh
Remember what happened after Pectra went live back in May? Ethereum bled for weeks leading up to it – classic “sell the news” behavior. Then the upgrade hit, the network actually got faster, and within days we were off to the races. The rally that followed took us to new all-time highs by late summer.
Fast forward to today and the setup looks eerily similar. Price has corrected hard from the Q3 peak, sentiment is shaky, and yet the fundamentals keep improving behind the scenes. If Fusaka delivers even half of what’s promised on data availability, the post-upgrade price action could mirror – or exceed – what we saw after Pectra.
“The Fusaka upgrade represents the network’s largest update since The Merge and is expected to address data availability for rollups – one of the most pressing bottlenecks.”
– Major asset manager report, October 2025
Dominance Is Doing Something Interesting
One chart that rarely gets the attention it deserves is ETH dominance. Right now it’s consolidating in a zone that acted as major support/resistance back in 2021 – right before the monster altcoin run that carried us through that bull market.
Think about that for a second. The last time dominance held this exact area, Ethereum went on to outperform Bitcoin by more than 300% over the following months. History doesn’t repeat, but it absolutely rhymes. And right now, the rhyme sounds pretty loud.
- Dominance bouncing off multi-year trend support
- Consolidating in the same zone that launched the 2021 altseason
- Refusing to break lower despite Bitcoin strength
That’s not random noise. That’s a market quietly positioning for the next leg up.
The ETH/BTC Pair Everyone Should Be Watching
If you only follow price in USD, you’re missing half the story. The ETH/BTC pair has been in a downtrend for months, but something shifted this week. We’re now retesting the multi-month descending resistance line – and the reaction has been… interesting.
Rejection here would obviously be bearish. But a clean break above with volume? That’s the kind of move that kicks off parabolic outperformance against Bitcoin. And guess what usually follows that? Altseason.
I’ve watched this pair for years, and these retests rarely stay quiet for long. Either we get rejected hard and ETH/BTC grinds lower – or we break out and the whole narrative flips overnight. Given everything else lining up, my money’s on the latter.
Wave Patterns That Keep Repeating
Technical analysts love to talk about wave structures, and for good reason – they actually work more often than most traders admit. One pattern in particular has shown up three separate times since the 2022 bear market low:
- Wave 1: Initial impulse off the bottom
- Wave 2: Deep correction that shakes out weak hands
- Wave 3: The parabolic move everyone remembers
We’re deep into what looks like another Wave 2 right now. The correction has been painful, sentiment is terrible, and most people have completely forgotten about the upgrade coming next week. That’s exactly how these setups work. The worse it feels, the closer we usually are to the turn.
Each previous time this pattern printed, Ethereum went vertical shortly after. Three times is more than coincidence.
What Could Go Wrong?
Look, nothing is guaranteed in this market. We’ve all been burned before. There are legitimate risks here:
- The upgrade could have unexpected bugs (though testnets look solid)
- Bitcoin could enter a sharp correction and drag everything down
- Macro conditions could deteriorate quickly
- We might simply need one more leg lower to finish the correction
But here’s the thing – even accounting for all of that, the risk/reward looks heavily skewed to the upside right now. The network is about to get a massive scalability boost, dominance is holding key levels, the BTC pair is at make-or-break, and sentiment is about as negative as it gets.
That’s usually when the best opportunities appear.
The Bottom Line
Ethereum is at an inflection point. The Fusaka upgrade isn’t just another routine update – it’s the kind of fundamental improvement that can change price narratives overnight. Combine that with technical setups that have preceded every major rally in this cycle, and you have what might be one of the highest-conviction opportunities we’ve seen in months.
Will it play out perfectly? Probably not. Markets never do. But the pieces are falling into place in a way that’s hard to ignore.
Six days until Fusaka. Whatever happens after that, one thing feels certain – we won’t be talking about $2,800 support for much longer.
Disclosure: The author holds ETH at the time of writing. This is not financial advice – always do your own research.
