Active Users On Ethereum Layer 2s Surges To New Highs

The number of active users within Ethereum’s Layer 2 ecosystem is surging to new all-time highs.

Ethereum L2s hosted activity from nearly 3.5 million unique wallets between Feb. 26 and March 3, according to data from GrowThePie. The number of weekly active Layer 2 users has now grown 788% since opening 2023 at 386,393.

The milestone marked the third week ever that Layer 2s hosted more than 3 million active users, beating out the previous week’s record of 3.12 million.

Data from L2beat also shows the combined throughput of Layer 2s trending between 107.5 transactions per second (TPS) and 125.6 TPS over the same period — marking the strongest activity on record excluding the current all-time high of 152 TPS and Dec. 16 and 131.9 TPS on Feb. 25.

For comparison, the Ethereum mainnet hosted between 13.7 TPS and 14.3 TPS.

The unprecedented activity highlights the success of Ethereum’s rollup-centric scaling roadmap, which has prioritized facilitating high throughput and cheap transactions on Layer 2 instead of trying to achieve such on Ethereum’s mainnet base layer.

But the spike in Layer 2 transactions has been accompanied by rising fees, which are up by between 100% and 320% across the five most active L2s.

However, Ethereum’s highly-anticipated Dencun upgrade, which is scheduled to go live on March 13, is expected to drive a significant reduction in the costs of transacting on Layer 2 by replacing calldata with Binary Large Objects (blobs). Traders punting on a Polymarket prediction market are currently betting that blobs will be more than 98% cheaper to produce than calldata.

ZkSync Era tops L2 rankings amid airdrop speculation

ZkSync Era continued to rank as the top by active users, hosting a record of 948,400 unique wallets last week. Arbitrum came second with 580,360 users, followed by Linea with 417,500, and OP Mainnet with 284,900.

Notably, ZkSync was the sole L2 to host a greater number of wallets than were active across multiple Layer 2s, with 944,300 users transacting on more than one Layer 2. However, the network’s stats are likely bolstered by airdrop opportunists seeking to maximize their activity across the ZkSync ecosystem in a bid to qualify for any future token drops from the project.

Linea, the rollup from Consensys, the prominent Ethereum software developer, ranks second by transaction volume after posting a record above 1.12 million alongside a new high for active users of nearly 386,000 on March 2. Activity on Linea has skyrocketed more than 800% since opening February at 123,900 daily transactions.