Ethereum’s active user base has surpassed that of major layer 2 networks as the protocol’s long-term development strategy begins to show results.
Data from Nansen shows that the number of active addresses on Ethereum climbed above 791,000 on Monday, exceeding activity on leading L2s such as Base, Arbitrum and Optimism.
Transaction costs have also fallen to record lows. Average daily fees dropped to about $0.15 on Monday, a sharp decline from roughly $11 per transaction just a year ago.
The improving user and cost metrics come as Ethereum developers advance ambitious plans aimed at making the network more resilient and “bulletproof.”
Ethereum active addresses surpass L2s as fees fall to pennies
The number of active addresses on the Ethereum network has climbed 71% over the past year, rising from about 460,000 accounts to current levels.
Transaction activity has also reached record highs while costs continue to fall. On Tuesday, Ethereum processed around 2.1 million transactions, with the average transaction fee holding at just $0.15.
Ethereum transactions were notoriously expensive not long ago. Between late 2021 and mid-2022, as decentralized finance surged and the NFT boom peaked, some users reported gas fees exceeding $200 per transaction.
Those costs raised doubts about Ethereum’s long-term usability. In response, layer 2 networks gained traction in 2023 as a way to scale the blockchain. Major industry players joined the push, including Coinbase, which launched its own L2 network, Base, opening its mainnet to users in August that year.
Ethereum itself underwent two major upgrades last year aimed at reducing costs and improving scalability. The Pectra upgrade in May expanded blob capacity — a mechanism for storing transaction data — enabling rollups to post data more cheaply and helping drive fees lower. Blob capacity was further expanded with the Fusaka upgrade, which went live on Dec. 3, 2025. Fusaka also introduced Peer Data Availability Sampling, allowing validators to verify transactions using small data samples instead of downloading entire blobs.
Alongside lower fees and rising address activity, Ethereum is increasingly being chosen as a settlement layer by developers. Data from Token Terminal shows that the number of new smart contracts created and deployed on Ethereum reached a record 8.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2025, signaling strong future network activity.
This momentum comes amid intensifying competition among layer 1 blockchains such as Ethereum, Tron, Solana and BNB Chain. Solana and BNB Chain currently lead the industry in transaction volume and active addresses, largely due to their high throughput and popularity for retail trading and memecoin activity. As competition grows, Ethereum developers are focused on future-proofing the network.
Ethereum for 100 years
On Monday, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said on X that the network must eventually reach a point where developers can “walk away.” He argued that applications cannot be sustainably built on a base layer that depends on continuous updates from a central vendor to remain usable. Instead, Ethereum itself must pass what he called the “walkaway test.”
While Ethereum is still far from that goal, Buterin outlined several core requirements to ensure the network’s long-term viability without relying on features beyond the existing protocol. These include full quantum resistance, an architecture capable of scaling by orders of magnitude, a state architecture designed to last decades, a general-purpose account model, a proof-of-stake system that can remain decentralized over the long term, and a block-building model resistant to centralization.
Buterin said developers should aim to “tick off at least one of these boxes every year, and ideally multiple.”
Significant changes are already on the horizon. The upcoming Glamsterdam fork, expected in 2026, will introduce perfect parallel processing, raise the gas limit to 200 million from the current 60 million, and further increase blob size. Perfect parallel processing is expected to boost transaction throughput and support larger block sizes without raising gas costs, marking another step toward Ethereum’s long-term resilience.
As Ethereum rolls out ongoing network upgrades, onchain data is pointing to rising activity on its layer 1. The payoff could be a blockchain resilient enough for developers to eventually step back from—one that future generations of builders can rely on as a stable foundation.
