In a milestone that blockchain developers have long anticipated, Ethereum Layer 2 networks have collectively surpassed the Ethereum mainnet in daily transaction volume for the first time. According to data from L2Beat, the combined transaction count across all Ethereum L2s reached 15.8 million on Tuesday, exceeding the mainnet 1.2 million transactions by a factor of thirteen.
The surge is being driven primarily by three networks. Coinbase Base chain leads with 5.2 million daily transactions, followed by Arbitrum at 4.1 million and Optimism at 2.8 million. Newer entrants like Blast, zkSync Era, and Linea are also contributing meaningful volume, collectively accounting for another 3.7 million daily transactions. Average transaction costs on these L2s range from $0.001 to $0.05, compared to $2-8 on the Ethereum mainnet.
The transition has been accelerated by Ethereum Dencun upgrade, implemented in March 2024, which introduced blob transactions that dramatically reduced the cost of posting L2 data to the mainnet. This single protocol change reduced L2 operating costs by approximately 90%, allowing them to offer near-zero transaction fees to end users while maintaining the security guarantees of the Ethereum base layer.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin described the milestone as validation of the rollup-centric roadmap that the Ethereum community adopted in 2020. He noted that the current architecture allows Ethereum to effectively process thousands of transactions per second while maintaining decentralization and security properties that would be impossible with a monolithic scaling approach.
However, the proliferation of L2 networks has raised concerns about fragmentation. Users and developers must navigate an increasingly complex ecosystem of bridges, different token standards, and varying security assumptions. Several projects are working on cross-L2 interoperability solutions, but a unified experience remains elusive. Critics argue that the multi-L2 architecture recreates many of the complexity problems that blockchain technology was supposed to solve.
