Network activity on the Ethereum mainnet has now surpassed that on layer 2 scaling blockchains as gas costs remain low, although not all may be organic users.
Token Terminal said Thursday that a “return to the mainnet” has occurred, with daily active addresses on Ethereum surpassing all leading layer 2 addresses.
A recent peak in active addresses topped out at 1 million per day, with Etherscan showing that active addresses had risen to around 1.3 million on January 16, but have since settled at around 945,000 daily active addresses.
This figure is higher than all layer 2 blockchains, including the popular networks Arbitrum One, Base Chain and OP Mainnet. According to L2Beat, the total value captured across all Layer-2s currently stands at $45 billion, down 17% over the past twelve months.
Ethereum network activity has surged this month following the Fusaka upgrade in December, which dramatically reduced gas rates. However, not all of them may be real users.
Ethereum L1 surpasses all L2 networks for daily active addresses. Source: Token terminal
Address the spike in poisoning attacks
Security researcher Andrei Sergeenkov said Monday that the spike in network activity can be partly attributed to dusting off or tackling poisoning attacks.
Address poisoning involves scammers sending small transactions from wallet addresses that resemble legitimate addresses, tricking users into copying the wrong address when making a transaction.
This has been made economically feasible by the drop in network costs, making it cheaper to spam the network.
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“It is reasonable to conclude that the recent spike in Ethereum network activity is substantially driven by address poisoning campaigns,” analysts at blockchain security firm Cyvers told Cointelegraph on Wednesday.
Cyvers analysts said that behavioral ranking and a statistical correlation “strongly suggest that address poisoning is not a marginal factor, but a significant contributor to the recent surge in Ethereum transaction volume.”
Ethereum is still king for asset tokenization
Regardless of the bogus activity, Ethereum remains “the preferred blockchain for on-chain assets,” ARK Invest reported on Wednesday. Assets on Ethereum now exceed $400 billion, and the global market for tokenized assets could exceed $11 trillion by 2030, it added.
Stablecoins make up the bulk of these assets, with Ethereum controlling a 56% share of the stablecoins on the chain, and a 66% share of all tokenized real-world assets when layer-2 networks are included, according to RWA.xyz.
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