Author: Tanay Ved Source: Coin Metrics Translation: Shan Ouba, Jinse Finance
This article will explore Ethereum, its Layer-2 ecosystem, and how Solana is evolving to meet the growing on-chain demand.
Ethereum is gradually scaling up through its mainnet and Layer-2 Rollups. From early congestion in the NFT and DeFi space to recent market volatility, gas limit increases and upgrades like Dencun and Pectra have expanded network capacity, while Blob transactions have significantly reduced data costs.
Layer-2 helps to offload Ethereum's growing demand and improve throughput efficiency.
Layer-2 helps to divert Ethereum's growing demand and improve throughput efficiency.
The Blobscriptions boom in April 2024 and the liquidation wave in October 2025 demonstrated the resilience of Layer-2 under pressure, but also exposed its continued reliance on mainnet capacity. Solana's high-throughput design enables localized congestion isolation without relying on external scaling layers. During the Trump token issuance in January 2025, the average transaction fee rose to $0.37, but the median fee remained below $0.003, indicating that localized fee markets can isolate congestion without driving up overall network costs. As demand continues to grow in scale and diversity, a new wave of networks is emerging within the blockchain trade-off space, specializing in specific use cases.
Periods of surging on-chain activity or network congestion, much like rush hour traffic tests a city's highway system, reveal the importance of scalability for the large-scale adoption of blockchain. Token issuance, airdrops, and market volatility can all trigger explosive growth in demand, exceeding network capacity, thus driving up transaction fees and exposing infrastructure limitations.
From Ethereum's scaling through Layer-2 Rollups and mainnet capacity increases to Solana's adoption of an integrated high-throughput solution, blockchain is steadily maturing to cope with increasing activity. Past congestion events have become valuable stress tests, showcasing both the network's evolution and highlighting the challenges that still need to be addressed in the process of accelerating application adoption.
This article will explore the scaling progress of Ethereum, its Layer-2 ecosystem, and Solana.
By analyzing transaction activity, fee dynamics, and network capacity, this study assesses how each network adapts to growing demand and what this means for the next phase of on-chain growth. Ethereum Layer-1: The Backbone Network Ethereum's scaling journey is essentially about balancing decentralization and security to increase transaction throughput and speed for large-scale applications – a balance that has always been central to its development roadmap. Early on, Ethereum repeatedly faced increased usage costs due to limited network capacity and surging demand, highlighting the necessity of scaling solutions. Ethereum's capacity is determined by block gas limits, which dictate the amount of computation each block can accommodate. Each transaction consumes gas based on its complexity, and users must pay a fee denominated in ETH (in Gwei) to have their transactions processed. When the demand for on-chain transactions exceeds the available block space, the network raises the gas price, reflecting competition for limited capacity. The following chart shows the changes in Ethereum's gas price during four major congestion events, each reflecting the evolution of the pricing mechanism during network scaling: (Source: Coin Metrics Network Data Pro) In 2018, CryptoKitties launched: This marked Ethereum's first major congestion event, with an NFT game consuming most of the available block space. Gas fees exceeded 450 Gwei (approximately $596 USD) due to user competition for block slots. At the time, transaction fees were determined through public auctions, meaning that applications with high demand could consume the entire network's resources during peak periods. The 2021 DeFi and NFT boom: The explosive growth of DeFi and NFTs pushed transaction fees above 2000 Gwei, exposing the limitations of the Ethereum transaction fee market in complex smart contract application scenarios. This directly led to the implementation of EIP-1559—a proposal that replaced the auction mechanism with dynamic base fees, automatically adjusting fees based on demand, and burning some transaction costs, making pricing more predictable. The 2022 Yuga Labs Otherside mint event: Despite EIP-1559, the highly anticipated metaverse land project Otherside mint briefly pushed gas fees to a record high of 8000 Gwei. This indicates that fee market reforms alone cannot handle extreme demand peaks, and has accelerated the development of Layer-2 Rollups and application-specific chains to divert mainnet activity. The October 2025 market liquidation wave: Although congestion has occurred recently (such as the WLFI token issuance and the October 10th liquidation wave), the impact has been significantly reduced. Fees rarely exceed 1000 Gwei and quickly return to normal, demonstrating the diversion effect of Layer-2 and the continuous capacity improvement effect of Layer-1. These events collectively demonstrate Ethereum's scaling process: EIP-1559 improves fee efficiency, Layer-2 Rollups now handle a large amount of activity that originally needed to be processed on the mainnet, and the gradual increase in block gas limits continuously expands the computational load of each block, effectively widening the main road of Ethereum's throughput. In 2025, Ethereum's daily transaction volume exceeded 1.8 million, while the average transaction fee dropped to a multi-year low. As shown in the chart below, the block gas limit has recently been increased to 45 million, with plans to further increase it to 100 million or more in the future to support the expanding transaction volume as activity grows.
(Source: Coin Metrics Network Data Pro)
Layer-2 expands Ethereum's capacity by adding new throughput channels, diverting growing demand while maintaining low transaction fees. Layer-2 projects such as Base and Optimism have seen a surge in activity—they process transactions at low cost first, then package and settle them on the Ethereum mainnet in batches.
(Source: Coin Metrics Network Data Pro)
April 2024 Blobscriptions Craze: Shortly after the Ethereum Dencun upgrade, Blobscriptions (NFT-like data inscriptions written to Blob space) triggered a surge in Layer-2 activity.
April 2024 Blobscriptions Craze: Shortly after the Ethereum Dencun upgrade, Blobscriptions (NFT-like data inscriptions written to Blob space) triggered a surge in Layer-2 activity.
（Source: Coin Metrics Network Data Pro）
Blob space was introduced by EIP-4844 in the Dencun upgrade and scaled up through the Pectra upgrade, and has now become the core of Ethereum scaling. As shown in the figure above, with the increase in capacity, the number of Blobs uploaded per block continues to increase, and is now close to the new target of 6 Blobs per block. At the same time, Blob fees have remained close to zero, minimizing costs for Layer-2 and end users.
(Source: Coin Metrics Network Data Pro）
Blob space was introduced by EIP-4844 in the Dencun upgrade and scaled up through the Pectra upgrade, and has now become the core of Ethereum scaling.
(Source: Coin Metrics Network Data Pro)
This phenomenon reflects Solana's localized fee market design—congestion in a single hotspot does not drive up network-wide costs. Each transaction includes a fixed base fee, plus an optional priority fee determined based on the requesting computational units (CUs). Therefore, users interacting with highly competitive applications or tokens may face higher priority fees, but most users can still complete transactions at a low cost.
This phenomenon reflects Solana's localized fee market design—congestion in a single hotspot does not drive up network-wide costs. Each transaction includes a fixed base fee, plus an optional priority fee determined based on the requesting computational units (CUs). Therefore, users interacting with highly competitive applications or tokens may face higher priority fees, but most users can still complete transactions at a low cost.
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