The Ethereum mainnet is experiencing a lull. The number of daily transactions has decreased, and the count of daily active addresses (DAU) has fallen.
According to Etherscan, 1.1 million transactions were conducted on the network on August 5. In comparison, the peak on January 14 was 1.96 million, and local highs in July reached 1.3 million.
The seven-day moving average of the metric fell to 1.09 million. This is the lowest level observed since February.
The DAU count also reached February lows at 400,000. The figure has been rapidly declining since the end of June, when it recorded a local peak of 715,000 addresses.
Despite the “stagnation” in the mainnet, layer two solutions continue to show high activity. According to the Dune dashboard, L2 networks significantly outperform the main blockchain in terms of daily transactions.
At the time of writing, Base leads among major scaling solutions with about 3.5 million, followed by Arbitrum at 2.9 million.
Other L2 networks — Optimism (860,000), ZKsync (418,000), and Scroll (308,000) — have not surpassed the mainnet.
According to L2BEAT, Base also leads in transactions per second, second only to the L3 solution Xai.
The shift to rollups can be attributed to lower fees. In L2 networks, the average transaction fee does not exceed $0.04.
Currently, the gas price on the mainnet stands at 4 Gwei (~$0.16).
The dynamics of scaling solutions began to grow following the activation of the Dencun update in Ethereum. However, amid the surge in on-chain activity, some protocols faced delays.
Back in June, analysts from Coinbase and Glassnode reported that in the first half of the year, the number of daily active addresses in Ethereum and its main L2 solutions grew by 127%.