Ethereum’s base layer just printed its busiest day of the year. Etherscan reported on X that Ethereum L1 processed 1,913,481 transactions on December 23 with an average fee of roughly $0.16, a 2025 high for mainnet throughput at current gas prices. ETH traded just under $3,000 around the announcement, hovering near $2,950 with little intraday follow‑through as traders weighed whether the throughput jump changes the near‑term value case.
📊 Ethereum L1 recorded its highest daily transaction count in 2025. Yesterday, Ethereum processed 1,913,481 transactions with an average fee of $0.16. Ethereum is scaling.
. Etherscan.eth on X
Coverage from outlets that picked up the post framed the print as a fresh record. The wording in the original Etherscan post is narrower. It calls this the highest daily transaction count in 2025, not an all‑time peak. Historical datasets compiled from Etherscan show a prior high near 1.96 million transactions on January 14, 2024, when on‑chain activity spiked around large flows and derivatives repositioning. That puts the new 1.91 million print just below the lifetime top, even as multiple dashboards still list earlier 2025 readings around 1.92 million that likely reflect different aggregation windows or later data revisions.
Throughput record starts with a 60M gas limit
The headline number sits on top of a structural change most quick takes ignore. In late November, more than half of Ethereum validators began signaling for a higher block gas target, pushing the effective gas limit from 45 million to 60 million units per block. That change, documented by core developers and the Ethereum Foundation, roughly doubled L1 execution capacity in a year and landed on mainnet days before the Fusaka fork activated.
Fusaka then layered in more headroom. The upgrade increased block size by about one third and introduced PeerDAS, a scheme that lets nodes verify data blobs by sampling instead of downloading every byte, as detailed in an Etherscan technical note. Earlier in the year, the Pectra upgrade doubled the number of blob sidecars from three to six per block, cutting settlement costs for rollups that post data into blobs rather than calldata. Together with the 60M gas limit, these changes explain why the network can cram nearly 2 million standard transactions into a day without pushing fees back to 2021 levels.
The community has already picked up on this nuance. In the original r/CryptoCurrency thread that helped the news circulate, one commenter called out the omission directly, arguing that the jump in daily throughput tracks almost one‑to‑one with the gas limit hike from 30 million to 60 million over 2025. That framing puts protocol‑level capacity decisions, not just user demand, at the center of the new record.
Ethscriptions, BlobScriptions and the inscription overhang
Today’s record also lands after nearly two years of inscription experiments that stress‑tested Ethereum’s data plumbing. Ethscriptions, described in detail at ethscriptions.com, reinterpret ordinary calldata as a way to mint and transfer digital artifacts without deploying new contracts. The protocol later proposed ESIP‑8, or BlobScriptions, which stores inscription payloads in EIP‑4844 blobs rather than calldata.
That pivot from calldata to blobs produced one of Ethereum’s sharpest fee dislocations of the last cycle. When BlobScriptions went live in March 2024, Cointelegraph and other outlets logged blob gas prices spiking as high as 585 gwei, roughly $18 per blob, within hours of launch. Fees later drifted back toward $1 as the initial mint wave cooled, but the episode showed how quickly inscription demand can absorb a new data lane when it opens.
Academic work on the 2023–24 inscription boom backs up that picture. A 2024 study of EVM inscriptions found that on some days inscriptions accounted for nearly 90% of all transactions on Arbitrum and zkSync Era and about 53% of Ethereum mainnet transactions, with 99% of those flows tied to meme‑style token minting rather than long‑lived applications. That mix turned blockspace into a short‑term casino and exposed how fragile fee markets become when speculative inscriptions dominate the mempool.
More recent dashboards tell a different story. Reporting from The Defiant, based on Dune data, shows inscription activity collapsing on major Ethereum rollups and Polygon, falling into low single‑digit shares of total transactions on most leading L2s. Inscriptions still dominate activity on Avalanche and Ethereum’s Goerli testnet, but they no longer drive the bulk of volume on the main commercial stacks.
That context matters for interpreting the new 1.91 million print. Ethscriptions and other inscription‑style protocols still exist and continue to embed data directly into mainnet transactions and blobs. The protocol’s own documentation now leans into blobs as a cheaper storage rail. Yet the evidence this week points first to expanded capacity and broad‑based on‑chain usage, not a single speculative inscription wave, as the primary engine behind the latest throughput high.
Fees stay low while L2s pull volume off L1
The other quiet part of this record is the fee line. An average cost of around $0.16 for an L1 transaction would have looked unreal during the NFT mints and DeFi liquidations of 2021. Analysts tracking Dencun’s impact estimate that average mainnet fees dropped more than 90% between early 2024 and early 2025 as rollups moved calldata into blobs and stopped bidding against ordinary users for blockspace. On L2, that effect was even sharper, with swaps that once cost dollars now clearing for cents.
At the same time, Ethereum’s rollup stack has pushed total ecosystem throughput into five‑figure TPS territory. Data from GrowThePie and Cointelegraph show combined L2 throughput jumping into the tens of thousands of transactions per second over the past two months, with high‑throughput ZK platforms like Lighter contributing the bulk of the spike. A separate analysis from institutional research shops estimates that more than four fifths of Ethereum transactions now execute on L2 before settling back to mainnet, which helps explain why fee burn on L1 sits near record lows even as daily transactions hit multi‑year highs.
For traders, the signal is clear. Ethereum’s base layer is now processing 2025‑record traffic at fee levels low enough that bulk order routing, stablecoin flows and inscription experiments can run in parallel without tripping the breakers. The next question is not whether mainnet can handle the load. It is how much of that flow will continue to migrate to rollups that already clear tens of thousands of transactions per second while L1 cements its role as the final settlement and data availability backstop.
