Base surpasses Ethereum mainnet txns

Ethereum scaling is starting to look less like a theory and more like the actual product. Base — Coinbase’s Layer 2 network — is now handling much more day-to-day t(l2beat.com)n May 7, L2BEAT showed Base at 136.47 user operations per second, while Ethereum mainnet sat at 22.85. (l2beat.com)the architecture Ethereum has been pushing toward for years. Mainnet keeps the security and settlement role. Rollups absorb the noisy, frequent, retail-sized (l2beat.com) it stops being a roadmap slide and starts being the default place people actually click, trade, mint, and move money. (l2beat.com) ### What exactly got passed? Base did not “beat Ethereum” in the sense of replacing it. The thing it surpassed is day-to-day execution activity. L2BEAT’s act(l2beat.com) times Ethereum mainnet’s pace on a user-operations basis — 136.47 versus 22.85 UOPS. That metric is meant to normalize activity across chains, so the comparison is about usable throughput, not just raw block trivia. (l2beat.com) ### Why use UOPS instead of plain transactions? Because raw transaction counts can get we(l2beat.com)rom another, and account-abstraction style flows can blur what a “transaction” even is. L2BEAT uses user operations to get closer to the thing people care about — how many actual user actions a chain is handling. That makes the Base-versus-Ethereum comparison more meaningful than a simple explorer screenshot. (l2beat.com) ### So is Ethereum losing activity? Not exactly. Ethereum mainn(l2beat.com)n data shows mainnet doing roughly 2 million transactions a day in early May 2026. The shift is more about where marginal activity goes. Cheap, frequent, consumer-style actions increasingly land on L2s, while mainnet keeps the high-value settlement, data availability, and security role underneath them. (ycharts.com) ### Why is Base the one pulling ahead? Distribution, basically. Base s(l2beat.com)t retail user funnel. That lowers the friction that usually kills crypto onboarding. It also spent the past year increasing capacity — Base said it had already handled bursts near 1,500 transactions per second with median fees under $0.05 during 2025 scaling work. Cheap blockspace plus Coinbase distribution is a strong combo. (blog.base.dev) ### Is t(ycharts.com)value or automated — that’s the catch. But Base is not empty volume. L2BEAT shows about $12.42 billion in value secured on the network, and DefiLlama shows roughly $4.54 billion in DeFi TVL, $13.5 billion in bridged TVL, and more than 500,000 active addresses over 24 hours. That is real capital and real app usage, not just vanity throughput. (l2beat.com) ### What changes for apps and traders? Liquidity, walle(blog.base.dev)on Base, then DEX depth, stablecoin inventory, and app distribution on Base become more important than simply being “on Ethereum.” Ethereum still matters — a lot — but increasingly as the chain that secures and settles the system rather than the place every small action happens. (l2beat.com) ### Does this mean one L2 wins everything? No. Arbitrum is still larger by value secured on L2BEAT, (l2beat.com)ion. But Base has the activity lead, and that combination — heavy usage plus large secured value — is why this move stands out. It suggests the L2 race is splitting into two contests: where capital sits, and where users actually do things. (l2beat.com) ### Bottom line? Base passing Ethereum mainnet in daily execution activity is not a side story. It is the rollup-centric thesis(l2beat.com)still the foundation. But the consumer internet layer on top of it is increasingly happening somewhere else — and right now, that somewhere is Base. (l2beat.com)