According to a recent social media post by Etherscan, the Ethereum network processed a record 1.91 million transactions at Layer 1 (L1) in one day. At the same time, the fees are incredibly low at $0.16.
📊 Ethereum L1 records highest number of daily transactions in 2025
Yesterday, Ethereum processed 1,913,481 transactions with an average transaction fee of $0.16.
Ethereum is scaling ⧫ pic.twitter.com/AL9T5b8RHj
— etherscan.eth (@etherscan) December 24, 2025
This shows that the network can handle large amounts of traffic without imposing a price on regular users.
big progress
This combination of high throughput and low cost is a direct result of two major network upgrades performed in 2025: Pectra and Fusaka.
Fusaka, who went live earlier this month, said the upgrade was most directly responsible for this record. This upgrade directly expands the capacity of the Ethereum L1 blockchain.
This upgrade succeeded in increasing the size of each block by approximately 33%. This allowed the L1 network to fit significantly more transactions into every block.
Previously, all nodes had to download all data, creating a bottleneck. PeerDAS, a new feature introduced in Fusaka, allows nodes to examine data “blobs,” large chunks of transaction data, by sampling a small portion of it. Introduced in a previous update called Dencun and expanded upon here, blobs are like sidecars connected to the main block. It allows data to be transmitted cheaply and does not conflict with standard transactions.
Pectra’s upgrade in May laid the foundation for scaling by optimizing how Layer 2 networks such as Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base interact with the main chain.
Pectra has doubled the number of these “sidecars” from three to six per block. Because the supply of space for Layer 2 data has suddenly doubled, the cost for L2 to “stick” on Ethereum has decreased. This eliminated congestion throughout the network.
Further scaling challenges
Despite the huge success of the 2025 upgrade, Ethereum’s scaling is not yet “done.”
The Ethereum ecosystem remains fragmented. Users tend to find it difficult to use L2 funds without complex bridges. Therefore, fragmentation remains a big problem.
The database of all accounts, balances, and smart contracts (“states”) grows larger and larger. Eventually, the state will be a terabyte or petabyte in size. If it gets too big, the average person won’t be able to buy a hard drive big enough to run a node.
