Ethereum (ETH) applications generated $1.8 billion in fees last quarter, but the base chain kept just $88 million of it, about 4.9%, on-chain data shows.
Key Points:
- Ethereum's layer-1 produced more than $88 million in real economic value in the second quarter, a 7% gain on the prior three months.
- Rollups now settle about 1,270 user operations per second, against 20.4 on mainnet.
- ETH traded near $1,867 as August opened after a 20.3% July, its strongest month in a year.
Ethereum Layer-1 Value Capture Falls Behind
An analyst who posts under the handle Tanaka compiled the quarterly figures from public on-chain dashboards. The gap they describe has become one of the loudest arguments surrounding Ethereum and the asset behind it. The layer-1 produced more than $88 million in real economic value between April and June, a 7% improvement on the first quarter of the year. That same measure still sits down close to 70% from a year earlier.
The throughput picture looks stranger still. Rollups now settle about 1,270 user operations per second, against 20.4 on mainnet. Robinhood Chain alone runs about five times the volume of Ethereum's base layer.
Ethereum turned 11 in July, and the upgrades shipped since the Merge have pushed the network far past its proof-of-work throughput, though the token itself has captured little of that growth.
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Tanaka Sees Ethereum Thesis Moving To Tokenized Finance
Tanaka does not argue that Ethereum is broken, and says the plan is to keep buying and holding ETH. The older thesis held that more users would bring more fees and a faster burn, tightening supply as adoption widened. That logic has weakened. Attention has shifted instead toward tokenized finance and the settlement business around it.
Roughly 41.10 million of the 121.88 million ETH in supply now secures the chain, or about 33.7%, at a staking issuance yield near 2.6%. Blob fees burned only around 0.22 ETH over a recent seven-day window, a negligible offset to that issuance. Annual supply growth sits close to 0.85%.
Tokenized real-world assets on Ethereum have climbed past $17 billion, while the stablecoin market has expanded toward $300 billion in total value. Tanaka argues the edge is now institutional settlement, not cheap transactions.
The open questions are whether blob space ever grows scarce enough to matter, and whether institutions start holding the asset as reserve collateral. Scaling, the analyst says, is no longer the problem.
ETH Price Holds Below The $2,000 Line
ETH finished July up 20.3%, its strongest month in a year, after a June slide of 21.8% undid much of the spring recovery.
The token traded near $1,867 as August opened, still short of the $2,000 line it lost earlier in 2026, and roughly 60% below its record high. Spot funds tracking the asset drew $365.17 million across July, their best monthly haul of the year, lifting total assets in those products above $10 billion.
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