The Ethereum ecosystem has seen a staggering increase in daily active users, nearly nine times more than four years ago, with analysts predicting that the rising demand will drive Ether (ETH) to new heights.
Bitwise data shows that in the first quarter of 2020, there were over 250,000 daily active users on Ethereum and its scaling solutions Arbitrum and Polygon, primarily on the Ethereum layer-1 mainnet. By the first quarter of 2024, this number had surged to around 2.25 million, including the recently launched layer-2 networks Optimism, Base, and zkSync.
With transactions moving to L2s, Ethereum’s share of active daily users has decreased significantly. As of June 4, Ethereum mainnet had 378,000 active users, while Polygon had 1.3 million, and the other four L2s combined had around 1.5 million active users.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is focused on using L2s to scale the main blockchain, likening them to the sharding concept of the old Eth 2 plan. He believes L2s could help foster growth in various subcultures within the Ethereum ecosystem.
VanEck, a crypto ETF issuer, has raised its price target for Ethereum, expecting the cryptocurrency to reach $22,000 by 2030. They anticipate that spot ether ETFs will soon be approved for trading on U.S. stock exchanges, allowing financial advisors and institutional investors to benefit from the pricing and liquidity advantages of ETFs.
Despite lower user numbers, Ethereum still generates three times more in fees than the top layer 2 networks and Solana combined. L2s pay Ethereum fees to settle transactions on the main chain and leverage its security.
As of now, Ether is priced at $3,862, with a 1.3% increase in the last 24 hours. The launch of spot Ether ETFs is expected to drive the price of Ether to new all-time highs, although some caution that inflows into these new crypto ETFs may be lower than those into Bitcoin ETFs.