The week: Ethereum’s big upgrade and a broader institutional push

Fusaka upgrade, institutional moves, and Poland’s crypto veto: the week in crypto

Bitcoin steadied, the Ethereum network rolled out the Fusaka hard fork, Vanguard and Bank of America opened access to crypto products, Poland’s president vetoed a digital-assets bill, and other highlights from the week.

Market uncertainty

As the new month began, the leading cryptocurrency fell sharply. On Monday, 1 December, the asset plunged from $92,000 to $85,000. Possible drivers included broader macroeconomic jitters and an attack on the Yearn Finance protocol. 

By Tuesday, digital gold clawed back losses, rebounding to $94,000. 

Bitcoin traded in a $91,000–94,000 range until Friday, when it broke support near the lower bound and slid to $88,000.

Into the weekend the asset moved sideways and, at the time of writing, was trading around $89,500. It fell roughly 2% over seven days. 

Despite strong on-chain metrics and a recovery in ETF inflows, bitcoin remains under heavy selling pressure. 

Early whales and coins stirred over the week. A Satoshi-era miner “woke up” after 15 years and moved 50 BTC to new addresses. In addition, 2,000 BTC moved from a physical Casascius series.

Arab Chain specialists also noted that in November crypto miners transferred more than 220,000 BTC to Binance, up from 186,000 BTC in October. 

CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju warned that negative sentiment dominates the crypto market. Without an influx of macro liquidity, he said, the industry risks entering a prolonged downturn.

Most top-10 cryptocurrencies by market value, like bitcoin, were subdued. DOGE (-6.7% over seven days), XRP (-6.8%) and SOL (-3%) led declines.

Total crypto market capitalisation fell to $3.12 trillion. BTC dominance is 56.9%, ETH — 11.7%.

The popular market-sentiment gauge stands at 20, signalling “extreme fear”.

Fusaka hard fork 

On 3 December, Ethereum developers successfully activated the Fusaka upgrade on mainnet. Full rollout concluded on 5 December.

The hard fork is meant to deliver foundational improvements to boost the scalability, efficiency and security of the network behind the second-largest cryptocurrency. 

Fusaka is the second-largest upgrade by scope, bundling ten improvement proposals. The most important — EIP-7594 — brings the PeerDAS protocol to Ethereum. The technology allows validators to verify small fragments instead of entire BLOB objects, improving data availability across the ecosystem. 

The upgrade also more than doubles the layer-1 gas limit. In theory, this lifts blockchain throughput to 12,000 TPS.

Other changes include: 

• EIP-7825: sets a 30m gas cap per transaction to harden network security and prevent overloads;
• EIP-7939 and EIP-7951: improve performance and expand ZK solutions. 

There were hiccups. Shortly after Fusaka’s activation, a failure in the popular consensus client Prysm took offline a portion of Ethereum validators. 

At one point only 75% of nodes were signing current block headers, and participation in consensus fell to 74.7%. The network teetered on the brink of a major outage, but the issue was stabilised. 

Ether’s price reacted positively to the hard fork, briefly jumping from $2,700 to $3,200. It has since eased to about $3,000, little changed on the week.

What to discuss with friends? 

• CryptoQuant said it is preparing Strategy for a prolonged bear market.
• ViaBTC explained the reasons for restricting account access.
• AI models managed to ‘hack’ smart contracts worth $550.1 million.
• MetaMask introduced the Transaction Shield option.

Institutional access 

The week also marked an expansion by big institutional players. On 2 December, the world’s second-largest asset manager, Vanguard Group, opened access to trading ETFs and mutual funds based on digital assets.

The firm’s basket includes products based on bitcoin, Ethereum and other altcoins such as XRP and Solana.

Although Vanguard had previously criticised cryptocurrency as an “immature asset class”, the company shifted course after former BlackRock executive Salim Ramji became CEO.

“Cryptocurrency ETFs and mutual funds have been battle-tested during periods of market volatility, demonstrating expected results and maintaining liquidity. The administrative processes for servicing these instruments have become more mature, and investor preferences have changed,” said Andrew Kadjeski, head of brokerage and investment services at Vanguard.

One of America’s largest banks — Bank of America (BoA) — also announced it will start recommending that institutional clients allocate 1% to 4% of portfolios to digital assets.

The option will be available to users of the Merrill, Bank of America Private Bank and Merrill Edge platforms. From 5 January 2026 the product line will include Bitwise Bitcoin ETF (BITB), Fidelity’s Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund (FBTC), Grayscale’s Bitcoin Mini Trust (BTC) and BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT).

“This update reflects growing client demand for access to digital assets,” added Nancy Fahmy, head of BoA’s Investment Solutions Group.

Additionally, Uniswap Labs announced a partnership with fintech firm Revolut, enabling customers to buy digital assets directly in the exchange’s web app and wallet.

The service is available to residents of 26 countries in the European Economic Area. The platform supports more than 40 tokens. 

When using Revolut Pay, users pay only blockchain gas; there is no service fee. Existing neobank customers do not need additional KYC checks.

Telegram’s AI platform  

At the start of the week, Telegram founder Pavel Durov announced the launch of a “decentralized confidential computing network”, Cocoon.

The platform is designed for AI workloads on the TON network. It “securely connects” owners of graphics processing units (GPUs), who provide compute resources, with applications that require privacy and need to run AI models. This lets “lessors” earn income in cryptocurrency.

Cocoon consists of three components:

1. Client — the user pays for requests and sends them to a proxy.
2. Proxy — selects an appropriate worker and relays the request.
3. Worker — executes the request on a GPU.

“Anyone with a server with a GPU can rent it out and earn money. Requests and responses remain confidential and are known only to the client,” the developers said.

Durov noted that centralized compute providers such as Amazon and Microsoft act as costly intermediaries, raising prices and eroding privacy. Cocoon tackles both problems.

“Now we are scaling. Over the next few weeks we will onboard more GPU providers and developers. Telegram users will soon see new AI features offering 100% privacy,” he said.

TON barely reacted to the launch. At the time of writing, the asset was trading at $1.57.

Also on ForkLog:

• Corporate-treasury demand for Ethereum fell by 81%.
• BlackRock called stablecoins a bridge to traditional finance.
• The former Binance chief unveiled the prediction platform predict.fun. 
• ZachXBT reported the arrest of a suspect in the theft of 4,100 BTC from lender Genesis.

Regulatory rift in Poland

On 1 December, Poland’s president, Karol Nawrocki, vetoed the “Cryptoassets Market Act”. In his view, the bill’s provisions “threaten the freedoms of Poles, their property and the stability of the state”.

One key reason for the veto was a clause allowing authorities to block websites linked to the crypto market. He also pointed to the bill’s excessive complexity and size. 

“Overregulation is an easy way to make companies leave for Czechia, Lithuania or Malta instead of creating conditions for them to operate and pay taxes in Poland,” the president added.

Another sticking point was high supervisory fees that could stifle startup activity and favour foreign corporations and banks.

Not all politicians supported Nawrocki’s move. Finance Minister Andrzej Domański and Deputy Prime Minister Radosław Sikorski voiced their displeasure. 

Domański stressed that about 20% of users now lose funds due to abuses in the crypto market. Instead of regulation, he said, the president “chose chaos”. 

The Polish Sejm fell short by 18 votes of overturning the veto. 

The failed attempt forced the government to restart the process from scratch, leaving Poland the only EU member state without a domestic framework for MiCA.

What else to read? 

ForkLog examined the Outset Data Pulse report on crypto media in East and Southeast Asia. The study notes fundamental shifts in content consumption: direct visits to specialist outlets reached 54%, and major publications captured 82% of total regional traffic in the segment. 

What if leading states extend large-scale hybrid conflicts to the crypto economy, putting the integrity of the Bitcoin network at risk? Anatoly Kaplan posed this question and found it is not as idle as it may first seem.