The volume of active participants within Ethereum’s Layer 2 ecosystem is reaching unprecedented levels – approximately 3.5 million users engaged with L2 networks in the past week.
Between February 26 and March 3, Ethereum Layer 2 networks saw activity from nearly 3.5 million unique wallet addresses, as reported by GrowThePie. This represents a staggering 788% increase in weekly active users since the beginning of 2023, when the count stood at 386,393.
This milestone marks the third consecutive week where Layer 2 networks have accommodated over 3 million active users, surpassing the previous record set at 3.12 million.
Data from L2Beat also indicates that the combined throughput of Layer 2 networks ranged between 107.5 transactions per second (TPS) and 125.6 TPS during the same period, representing the highest activity levels recorded to date, excluding the all-time high of 152 TPS on December 16 and 131.9 TPS on February 25.
In comparison, Ethereum’s mainnet facilitated between 13.7 TPS and 14.3 TPS.
This surge in activity underscores the success of Ethereum’s rollup-centric scaling strategy, which prioritizes achieving high throughput and low transaction costs on Layer 2 rather than attempting to do so on Ethereum’s mainnet base layer.
However, the increase in transactions on Layer 2 networks has led to higher fees, which have risen between 100% and 320% across the five most active networks.
Nonetheless, Ethereum’s eagerly awaited Dencun upgrade, set to launch on March 13, is expected to significantly reduce transaction costs on Layer 2 by replacing calldata with Binary Large Objects (blobs). Traders speculating on a Polymarket prediction market anticipate that blobs will be over 98% cheaper to produce than calldata.
zkSync Era retained its position as the top network by active users, with a record of 948,400 unique wallets transacting last week. Arbitrum followed with 580,360 users, then Linea with 417,500, and OP Mainnet with 284,900.
Notably, zkSync was the only Layer 2 network to have more active wallets than were active across multiple networks, with 944,300 users transacting on more than one Layer 2. However, the network’s statistics may be inflated by opportunistic individuals aiming to maximize their activity across the zkSync ecosystem in hopes of qualifying for potential future token distributions.
Linea, the rollup developed by ConsenSys, a prominent Ethereum software developer, ranks second in transaction volume, having recorded over 1.12 million transactions along with a new high of nearly 386,000 active users on March 2. Activity on Linea has surged by more than 800% since the beginning of February, when daily transactions stood at 123,900.
