Ethereum records busiest quarter ever, but price remains stuck

Numbers don’t lie, but they don’t always tell the full story either. Ethereum processed 200.4 million transactions in the first quarter of 2026, according to data from crypto analytics platform Artemis, the highest quarterly figure in the network’s history and a 43 percent jump from the previous quarter. 

To put that in perspective, it’s more than double where the network sat at its low point in late 2023. By almost every onchain measure, Ethereum is thriving. The price, however, hasn’t exactly gotten the memo.

ETH traded around $2,100 through much of Q1, still sitting well below its October 2025 high above $4,900. The gap between what the network is doing and what the market is pricing is probably the most talked-about disconnect in crypto right now, and it raises a question worth sitting with: does raw activity still move the needle for ETH, or has the market moved on to other signals?

The milestone came alongside a surge in new users that caught analysts’ attention. Some 284,000 first-time wallet addresses joined the network between January and March, an 82 percent quarter-over-quarter increase, per Artemis data. Active addresses reached 12.6 million over the same stretch. The busiest single day of the quarter fell on Feb. 7, when the network settled nearly 2.9 million transactions, before cooling slightly through April.

Layer 2 networks get much of the credit

A big part of what drove the surge in transactions was the continued buildout of Layer 2 scaling networks, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism and others, that process transactions off-chain before settling on Ethereum’s mainnet. 

Thanks largely to EIP-4844, which dramatically cut the cost of posting transaction data from L2s to the base layer, fees on these networks have fallen to fractions of a cent for most interactions. That’s a material change from even two years ago, when gas costs alone kept many users away.

Over 60 percent of Ethereum transactions now run through rollups, according to ecosystem data, and the network’s stablecoin market cap has climbed to around $164 billion. DeFi, token transfers, NFT activity, and AI-powered agentic payments all contributed to the Q1 figures, with the broader crypto market reporting over 120 million agentic micro-transactions in the quarter alone, much of it flowing through Ethereum’s ecosystem.

Still, the question of whether L2 growth ultimately benefits ETH as a token remains contested. Standard Chartered estimated that Coinbase’s Base network alone may have removed as much as $50 billion from ETH’s market cap by capturing fees that would otherwise have accrued to the base layer. More activity doesn’t automatically mean more value flowing to ETH holders, at least not yet.

What comes next

The upgrade the Ethereum community has been most focused on is Glamsterdam, scheduled for the first half of 2026. The hard fork is expected to introduce parallel transaction processing, raise the gas limit significantly, from the current 60 million to around 200 million per block, and bring a roughly 78 percent reduction in gas fees across both simple transfers and complex smart contract calls. 

That combination could meaningfully lower the cost of onchain activity at the base layer, tightening the relationship between usage and fee burn in ways that may begin to show up in ETH’s value over time.

A second upgrade, Hegotá, is targeting the second half of the year and will focus on privacy improvements and censorship resistance, less flashy than throughput gains, but arguably more important for long-term institutional confidence.

BlackRock’s staked ETH ETF pulled in $155 million in day-one inflows at launch. Charles Schwab confirmed plans to offer direct ETH trading access for U.S. brokerage clients in the first half of 2026. And the Ethereum Foundation itself staked 22,517 ETH, worth roughly $50 million, on April 1, its largest single-day deposit, a move that at minimum signals long-term conviction from the core development team.

It is still unclear if the institutional interest eventually reconnects with the network’s onchain story. However, for now, Ethereum appears to be in an unusual position whereby although it is recording the strongest quarter on record, it is also still searching for a catalyst that makes the market take notice.