Ethereum L1 hit a peak of 2.2 million daily transactions while average fees fell to about $0.17 (Etherscan). This combination materially resets the cost baseline for mainnet settlement and makes high-frequency on-chain activity more economically viable without relying exclusively on Layer 2.
This throughput gain stands out because it arrived without the kind of fee blowouts that previously priced many users out of L1. The same context includes past extremes where single-transaction gas spikes exceeded $200 and an average-fee jump to roughly $8.48 on October 10 during a market stress event, underscoring how different today’s operating environment looks.
What’s driving the lower-fee, higher-throughput regime
Protocol and client improvements are enabling higher transaction inclusion without proportional fee inflation. In practical terms, more transactions are being processed per block while average costs remain low, which helps damp short-term fee volatility and improves planning for settlement-sensitive workflows.
For node operators and network architects, higher aggregate throughput shifts the operational focus from “can we process it” to “can we sustain it cleanly.” That means watching propagation times and block validation latency across the P2P topology, even if the per-transaction bandwidth and storage pressure per economic unit of work improves.
What this means for builders, staking dynamics, and infra teams
Developer activity has moved with the economics, with Token Terminal showing a large volume of new smart contract deployments in the latest quarter. The same dynamic suggests some workload that previously lived on Layer 2s is returning to L1 as mainnet transaction economics become more favorable.
Staking signals also lean constructive, with more ETH queued to stake than to exit, which markets read as higher validator confidence and commitment to network security. Operationally, that mix implies sustained demand on consensus and execution resources, making client diversity and inter-node latency observability non-negotiable for maintaining byzantine fault tolerances.
For DevOps, sustained volume makes “set-and-forget” configurations a liability rather than a shortcut. Optimized gossip settings, tuned peer bandwidth allocation, and vigilant monitoring of orphan/uncle rates become critical to preventing subtle congestion cascades as throughput stays elevated.
Net outcome: higher throughput at a lower marginal cost signals a maturity phase for mainnet settlement, supported by upgrades and stronger staking participation. The immediate takeaway is a lower execution-cost floor and a renewed business case for L1 settlement when finality and auditability matter.