The Ethereum network has reached a historic milestone with over 200 million transactions in the first quarter of 2026. But the Ether price remains far behind its all-time high.
• Over 200 million transactions
• Layer 2s as a catalyst
• Efficacy as an inhibitor
A historic milestone in network activity
The first quarter of 2026 marks a turning point for the Ethereum blockchain as it surpassed 200.4 million base transactions in three months for the first time. This development caps an impressive U-shaped recovery that bottomed out at around 90 million transactions in 2023 and has now accelerated massively in 2024 after a lengthy sideways movement, as CoinDesk points out. This represents a 43 percent jump in activity compared to the fourth quarter of 2025, underscoring the growing importance of the network as a fundamental infrastructure.
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The paradox between use and market value
Although on-chain data points to a thriving ecosystem, this success has so far been barely reflected in the price of the native token Ether, which was last traded at around $2,400 (price as of April 22, 2026). This is all the more astonishing because the price is more than 50 percent below its all-time high of over 4,900 euros, which was reached in August 2025. CoinDesk sees this as a classic divergence between fundamental metrics and market valuation, with such recovery patterns often preceding price increases in the past rather than following them. This decoupling is causing a stir among traders, as the purely statistical network strength and the real token price currently tell two completely different stories.
Layer 2s and stablecoins as engines of growth
The enormous increase in transactions is primarily due to the success of Layer 2 solutions such as Base, Arbitrum and Optimism, which process transactions cost-effectively and are then bundled on the Ethereum main layer, as CoinDesk and bitcoinfoundation.org agree. Additionally, Ethereum continues to serve as a dominant hub for stablecoins, with the total supply on the network reaching a record $180 billion. While these trends artificially inflate transaction numbers at Layer 1, most end users no longer interact directly with the base layer at all, instead remaining in the more efficient secondary networks.
The downside of technical efficiency
A key reason for the lack of a price rally may be the technical progress of the network itself, particularly due to the Dencun upgrade. Since this upgrade has dramatically reduced data costs for Layer 2 networks, higher transaction volume no longer automatically translates into higher fee revenue or increased burning of ETH tokens, as CoinDesk explains. Ethereum therefore earns less per transaction than before, weakening the direct flow of value to token holders. In addition, there remains uncertainty as to whether the growth will be generated by real new users or, as CoinDesk and bitcoinfoundation.org write, whether bot activity, which is increasingly dominating stablecoin volume, is distorting the statistics.
Markus Maier, editorial team at finanzen.net
