Layer‑2 Scaling Surge

Ethereum’s busiest activity is increasingly happening off the main chain, with Ethereum layer-2 networks now processing far more transactions than mainnet. (l2beat.com) A layer 2 is a network that batches users’ transactions elsewhere, then posts the results back to Ethereum for settlement. Ethereum.org says optimistic rollups move computation offchain and publish transaction data back on Ethereum, which cuts costs by spreading one batch across many users. (ethereum.org) L2BEAT’s activity dashboard showed rollups at about 1,330 user operations per second on April 20, 2026, versus 21.76 for Ethereum itself. That works out to roughly 115 million daily rollup operations against about 1.9 million on mainnet, though “user operations” are not identical to raw transaction counts. (l2beat.com) The shift has coincided with a sharp drop in Ethereum gas prices. Etherscan’s gas tracker showed an average gas price of 1.437 gwei on April 22, 2026, and its historical chart shows gas far below the levels common in earlier years. (etherscan.io, etherscan.io) A major reason is Ethereum’s March 13, 2024 Dencun upgrade, which added “blob” transactions, a cheaper lane for rollups to post data. Ethereum.org says proto-danksharding is designed to make layer-2 transactions “as cheap as possible” and eventually support more than 100,000 transactions per second. (ethereum.org) The growth is concentrated in a few large networks. L2BEAT’s summary page on April 22 listed Base at 92.49 user operations per second and $11.86 billion in value secured, Arbitrum One at 16.39 and $15.87 billion, and OP Mainnet at 16.39 and $1.55 billion. (l2beat.com) The tradeoff is control. Most major rollups still rely on a sequencer, the operator that orders transactions before they are posted to Ethereum, and L2BEAT’s stages framework says Stage 0 projects are controlled by a few entities while Stage 2 projects are “fully controlled by code.” (l2beat.com) That leaves builders arguing over what users should value more: fast, cheap transaction ordering run by a small set of operators, or slower systems that push more control back toward Ethereum’s base layer. Ethereum.org says optimistic rollups inherit security from mainnet by publishing results onchain and allowing challenges during a fraud-proof window. (ethereum.org) The ecosystem is also uneven in maturity. On April 22, L2BEAT classified Arbitrum One, Base, OP Mainnet, Starknet, Scroll, Ink, and Unichain as Stage 1, while many other large projects remained at Stage 0 and only a small number had reached Stage 2. (l2beat.com, l2beat.com) For Ethereum, the result is a chain that looks less like the place where every app runs and more like the court that settles disputes after the activity has moved elsewhere. The traffic surge on layer 2 shows that scaling is arriving, but mostly by pushing the crowd off the main floor. (ethereum.org, l2beat.com)