Ethereum L2 Costs Plummet

- The Pectra upgrade, which went live in May 2025, was Ethereum's largest to date, combining the Prague and Electra updates and bundling 11 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs). One of its key features is Account Abstraction, which allows users to pay transaction fees with tokens other than ETH. - Base's shift from the OP Stack to its own unified stack is intended to give it more control over its upgrade schedule and accelerate innovation. This move also means Base will retain sequencer revenue that was previously shared with Optimism's ecosystem. - EtherFi's migration to Optimism is a significant one, involving over 70,000 active crypto cards, 300,000 accounts, and more than $160 million in total value locked (TVL). The Ether.fi Cash platform has processed more than $265 million in total spending volume since launching in September 2024. - Robinhood's collaboration with Arbitrum extends beyond simple token swaps; the company has launched the public testnet for its own "Robinhood Chain," a Layer 2 network built with Arbitrum's technology. This new chain is specifically designed to support the tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs) like stocks and ETFs. - PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling) functions by allowing network nodes to verify data availability by downloading only a small, random sample of the data, rather than the entire dataset. This is the core mechanism that will allow Ethereum to securely increase the number of data "blobs" available for Layer 2s, drastically lowering costs. - The Pectra upgrade also significantly improves capital efficiency for Ethereum stakers by increasing the maximum effective balance for a single validator from 32