Ethereum L2 Ecosystem Peaks at 19,000 TPS

Ethereum’s Layer 2 networks reached a new record this week — a 24-hour peak of about 19,000 transactions per second, with the daily average under 10,000 TPS, according to GrowThePie’s “Ethereum Ecosystem TPS” dashboard. Most of the activity came from Lighter, a zero-knowledge perpetuals exchange that recently launched its mainnet.

Lighter processed several thousand TPS on its own, temporarily accounting for the majority of Ethereum’s overall transaction throughput. It uses ZK proofs to batch and verify trades on Ethereum mainnet, relying on the blob data system introduced by the Dencun upgrade (EIP-4844) earlier this year. Blobs significantly reduced the cost of posting compressed L2 data to Ethereum, allowing higher throughput without increasing mainnet load.

Other major L2s — Base, Arbitrum One, OP Mainnet, and Soneium — contributed smaller but steady portions to the total. The combined activity illustrates how Ethereum’s scalability now depends less on single-chain capacity and more on the aggregate throughput of its rollups.

The Dencun upgrade is central to this shift. By moving large data payloads into blob space, rollups can cheaply record transaction data while still settling on Ethereum’s security layer. The result is a modular system where computation happens off-chain, but finality and verification remain on-chain. The current throughput numbers show that this structure is functioning as intended.

It’s also clear that the increase came from an application-specific rollup, not from general-purpose usage. Lighter’s focus on high-frequency perpetual trading naturally produces large volumes of small transactions, which are efficient to batch and verify. The performance gain shows what is possible when a specialized L2 design is matched to a specific workload.

Ethereum’s base layer remains the coordination and settlement layer for these rollups. The fact that the system can sustain this level of throughput without a network-wide stress event indicates that the scaling path through blobs and rollups is working.

The next step will be to see whether similar gains appear across other L2s running different workloads — payments, gaming, and general-purpose smart contracts — and whether throughput can grow without centralizing sequencers or compromising verification.

For now, the data shows a clear trend: Ethereum’s scaling is no longer theoretical. The rollups are live, the blobs are being used, and the throughput is measurable.