Despite prolonged bearish action on the price of Ethereum, network activity has demonstrated notable growth and performance over the past few weeks. After reaching a crucial peak in network performance, the leading blockchain could be on the verge of another major achievement.
Another incoming record for Ethereum
In a significant development, the on-chain dynamics of Ethereum develops quietly, but convincingly. With increasing network performance and usage, the network is poised to make history, as revealed in a recent study by Leon Waidmann, market expert and head of research at the On-Chain Foundation.
Even during the price of Ethereum fell, its ecosystem managed to manage increasing activity throughout the year. In the post on X, Waidmann highlighted that the ecosystem is on track to close 2025 with a new record of transactions in this month of December.
As the chart shows, the leading network is getting dangerously close to its previous all-time high and will break it once again in the remaining days of this month. Interestingly, this strong performance highlights ETH’s continued role as the foundation of on-chain commerce.

Waidmann noted that global Ethereum, with the total number of transactions of layer 2, constantly pushes upwards. Several other major chains, such as Base, Arbitrum, Optimism (OP), World Chain, and mainnet ETH, are all contributing significantly to the surge in on-chain activity.
Amidst the growing Ethereum ecosystem, growth is not fueled by a single outlier, but rather is spread across the entire stack. These include decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFT), layer 2 networks and Real World Applications (RWA).
The ETH network dominates the DeFi sector
Ethereum’s network performance extends to the DeFi sector and appears to be leading the charge, outperforming other major blockchains. After an examination of the dynamic sector, Joseph Young, an Ethereum narrator, disclosed that blockchain currently controls over 68.2% of all total pure DeFi value locked (TVL).
Related Reading: Ethereum Takes Lead in DeFi Lending Revenue, Leaving Rivals Behind – Find Out How
To highlight it, over $69.3 billion has been deployed on smart contracts on ETH. This achievement highlights a new surge in capital concentration around core blockchain protocols. This is possible with liquidity, developer activity, and institutional conviction still favoring the network over other chains.
Young said this figure is higher than DeFi capital of Solana, Tron, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Bitcoin, Avalanche and all other chains combined. Due to this growing dominance, the expert declared ETH the most trusted financing settlement layer.
At the time of writing, Ethereum price was trading at $2,931, indicating a 1% decline in the last 24 hours. As the price turns negative, trading volume has also turned bearish, falling more than 7% over the past day.
Featured image from Pxfuel, chart from Tradingview.com
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