Ethereum's layer-2 scaling ecosystem has hit a new milestone. Daily transactions reached a record 12.42 million on August 12. This data comes from Growthepie, an Ethereum layer-2 block space analytics platform.
Leon Waidmann, head of research at the Onchain Foundation, chimed in on X. He reckons "scalability is improving rapidly" and "user activity is at its peak." No kidding.
The numbers are pretty impressive. Since the start of 2024, daily transactions have shot up by 140%. That's not small potatoes.
Growthepie's counting method is worth noting. They only include transactions from users or smart contracts. System transactions don't make the cut.
So what's driving this growth? Look no further than Base, Coinbase's L2 blockchain. It's been on fire lately. In late July, transactions on Base peaked at over 4 million.
Basescan, a metrics platform for Base, backs this up. They're reporting a whopping 700% increase in daily transactions over the past six months. That's bonkers.
Earlier this year, Cointelegraph pointed to memecoin mania as the culprit. Token minters are flocking to Base for its lower costs and higher throughput.
L2beat, another industry metrics platform, has some interesting insights. Overall throughput is up, with average TPS doubling in just two months. More scaling platforms are popping up too.
Growthepie dropped another bombshell. Layer-2 networks now host more stablecoins than Solana and Binance Chain combined. We're talking 150% more than Solana and 94% more than BNB Smart Chain.
Meanwhile, Ethereum's layer-1 is chugging along steadily. Daily transactions have hovered around 1.1 million for most of this year, according to Etherscan.
But here's a kicker: average gas fees on L1 Ethereum have hit yearly lows. Tether, the stablecoin issuer, minted 1 billion Tether for just 53 cents on August 13. Arkham, a blockchain intelligence platform, confirmed this.