Ethereum L1 in 2025: Surpassing expectations with 1.91 million daily transactions and minimal costs

Historic Milestone in Network Performance

By the end of 2025, Ethereum L1 achieved a record high by processing 1,913,481 transactions in a single day, with average fees of just $0.16. This data, confirmed by Etherscan, marks a significant turning point in the operational capacity of the mainnet, demonstrating that scalability is no longer just a theoretical promise but a tangible reality.

The most remarkable aspect is not only the transaction volume but that it was achieved while keeping costs accessible to any user. This combination eliminated one of the biggest obstacles that has historically caused a bottleneck in the ecosystem: the tension between congestion and affordability.

The updates that transformed Ethereum

The explosive performance improvement comes from two strategic updates executed during 2025. Pectra, implemented in May, revolutionized interaction between Layer 2 and the main chain by doubling the available space for sidecar data (from 3 to 6 per block). This expansion drastically reduced settlement costs for networks like Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base.

Fusaka, activated a few weeks ago, completed the puzzle by expanding the L1 block capacity by approximately 33%. The real innovation arrived with PeerDAS, a feature that allows nodes to verify data fragments (blobs) through selective sampling, eliminating the need to download complete data. This solved the old problem where each node had to process the entire information, creating a systematic bottleneck.

The blobs, originally introduced in Dencun but expanded in this latest update, act as containers for economic transactions that do not compete with the standard transaction space.

The challenges that persist

Despite these advances, Ethereum’s scalability still faces significant obstacles. Ecosystem fragmentation remains problematic: users find it complex to move funds between L2s without going through complex and potentially risky bridges.

A deeper challenge arises from the expansion of Ethereum’s (state). With each processed block, the database of accounts, balances, and smart contracts grows exponentially. Future projections suggest it could reach sizes of terabytes or petabytes, which would eventually limit the feasibility for ordinary users to run their own nodes with conventional hardware.

This problem underscores that although immediate transaction capacity bottlenecks have been addressed, long-term sustainability requires additional solutions in storage and data distribution.