Ethereum's base layer has achieved its busiest day of 2025, processing a record 1,913,481 Layer 1 transactions in a single 24-hour period. This milestone was accompanied by an average transaction fee of just $0.16, a combination that signals the network can handle heavy demand without pricing out everyday users. The data, highlighted by Etherscan in a social media post, demonstrates a material reshaping of mainnet economics due to recent scaling work.
The surge in throughput is directly attributed to two major network upgrades implemented in 2025. The Fusaka upgrade, activated earlier in December, increased block size by approximately 33% and introduced PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling). This allows nodes to verify data blobs by sampling small portions, easing a key throughput bottleneck. Blobs function as sidecars to main blocks, carrying data cheaply without competing with standard transactions.
Preceding Fusaka, the Pectra upgrade in May doubled the number of blob sidecars per block from 3 to 6. This expansion increased the supply of space for Layer 2 (L2) networks like Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base to submit their data, lowering their settlement costs on Ethereum and helping keep the base layer uncongested despite rising activity.
Despite these gains, challenges remain. The Ethereum ecosystem faces fragmentation across its L2 environments, complicating user movement of funds. Furthermore, continuous state growth—the expanding database of accounts and contracts—poses a long-term threat to node decentralization if it becomes too large for consumer hardware.
