# Ethereum - 2025 Year in Review | Matthias Seidl (December 2025) - Channel: [Berlin Ethereum Meetup](https://streameth.org/berlin-ethereum-meetup) - Date: 2026-04-09 - Duration: 32:17 - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-MdDojKargfA - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdDojKargfA ## Description Join us on Meetup to get up to date on our Berlin events: https://www.meetup.com/berlin-ethereu... See you at the next one! Apply to speak at our future meetups: https://forms.gle/txTvFB4E8E8KbEqX8 X (Twitter): @BerlinMeetup https://x.com/BerlinMeetup ## Transcript Nice. Cool. So, thank you very much, Aniko, because I think lots of stuff that you just covered in your presentation will also be relevant for what I'm going to show you. Um, but maybe a quick introduction from my side. Um, I'm Matias. I'm one of the co-founders of Grow the Pie. Uh, are people here familiar with Grow the Pie? Anyone who knows Grow the Pie, maybe quick show of hands. Oh, nice. Awesome. Cool. Nice. Um, yeah. So, for the people who don't know us yet, we're like a small independent team. Um we are like an Ethereum analytics platform for the whole Ethereum ecosystem though. So we track metrics on Ethereum mainet on layer 2s on applications that are either deployed on mainet or layer 2s and we also track yeah data availability metrics and other stuff. So definitely like have a look check it out growthe.com it's completely open for any end user. Um and yeah so uh Martin asked me to present a little year review from a data perspective. So I think it fits quite well with like what Aniko just like presented because she already introduced some more complex topics about these different upgrades that happened. Um and I now have like the easy way of just like showing you what it looks like in data. Um but yeah before we jump in um one question that was raised quite often uh beginning of this year is is Ethereum dead? Um not sure if you guys are active on Twitter. Um the ones that are may may or may not have seen like posts like this one um where someone claimed it was like a post from March 28th this year 2025 um okay Ethereum is completely dead it we seeing declines in transaction activity user growth and fees and revenue and then they even had some charts with it and it kind of triggered me a little bit because I'm also into data and charts um so let's maybe take a look from our perspective whether Ethereum missed that or not. Um, this post also got like quite a lot of views, right, with like 1 million views. Um, so it seems like other people also had that opinion earlier this year, but yeah, now we're in like December 2025 and I guess let's see where we're at. Um, so what we're going to talk through or what I will talk you through is like the technological progress on Ethereum mainet. um layer 2 land, what's happening on layer 2s, stable coins, real world adoption, and like a quick outlook into what's may or may not happen next. So, let's start with the technological progress on Ethereum mainet. Um, I put this timeline here. So, that's 2025 and I put a couple of vertical lines and yeah, so Enigo already mentioned a couple of things that happened. Um, but what like any ideas what these top white lines could be? It's not the hard forks, it's something else. >> Yes. Nice. Um, one hint I could have got given you guys is this one. Last year, end of last year, Tomas posted also on X, I support doubling the Ethereum mainet gas target. So end of last year it was still kind of like controversial whether Ethereum should actually double its gas target or not. Um but then yeah this year we actually started executing on that and these gas limit increases were mostly kind of like the community the validators specifically had to align whether they wanted to bump their own gas targets and it did happen this year um three times. We had one um increase in yeah around early February we increased the gas limit from 30 million to yeah from 30 million to 36 million. Then in July we increased it again from 36 million to 45 million. And then just very re recently from 45 million to 60 million. So if we go from 30 million to 60 million, we actually achieved it and we doubled the gas target in 2025, which is pretty cool, especially when you look at um like the charts what it means doubling the gas target. Not sure if you guys are familiar or if everyone's familiar with the concept of gas, but basically each um it's basically in doubling the size of each Ethereum block, right? Gas is like how we measure the the complexity of Ethereum transactions. If you double the gas target, you basically double the roughly set the number of transactions you can put into a block assuming each transaction has the same complexity. Um so what does it mean to like Ethereum mainet TPS capacity? We earlier in January 2025, we started out here with 12.5 TPS and then we had these um gas target increases and now we up here at 25 TPS which is like yeah doubling the transactions per second on Ethereum and it's especially cool because if you see um if you see this part here for how many years is that one two three for three and a half years, we basically didn't see any increase here at all. And that's probably also why lots of people started to claim, okay, Ethereum is dead. Um, but yeah, lots of change happened here um this year, which is exciting to see. >> Yes, >> this is like a take an average transaction and >> yes, exactly. So, this is not the actual transaction count. This is just like the if you assume the transaction complexity of like 100,000 gas, which is roughly the median transaction size, then this is the theoretical transaction per second capacity. Good, good point. Yeah, I was I wanted to show a transaction count chart, but then it looks a little wonky because the transaction complexity actually increased. We now see more complex transactions on Ethereum mainet. Um, which is Yeah. I mean, now we have more gas, we have more DeFi stuff happening, and we see more complex transactions as well. Yeah. Yes, >> I think Visa does like 65,000 a second. >> Yes. >> Yes, we we're not we're not quite there yet. Yeah, but I I'll show you more numbers in a bit. Yeah. >> Does this flatline here kind of imply that the blocks were full? >> Um >> here on this chart, you can't really see it, but yes, Ethereum blocks were basically full since I think 2020. Like Ethereum always had a supply issue, not a demand issue. Blocks have always been full. We just couldn't like Ethereum main just couldn't process more transactions here. Um, okay. Any other questions on this chart? I'll keep going here. Um, so yeah, first time since 2021. Back to the timeline here. Um, I think the blue ones are now easy. These are the ones that were already mentioned. Um, the first one is the petra upgrade and the second one is the Fusaka upgrade. So yeah, thanks again Ino for like going into details what it means because I'm not going to walk you through all of the different upgrades here. Um each of these um forks had like a bunch of EIPs in them. What I mostly care about right now is like what it what they mean for um scaling and Pectra specifically had what Iniki also mentioned had the blob target increase in it. We went from from three blocks to six blocks uh sorry blobs from three blobs to six blobs which meant yeah more bops for layer 2s. And then Fusaka also had another um EIP in it which allows us to schedule these BPO forks that allow us to increase blobs even further and more blobs as we just learned also is more storage for layer 2 data because we actually hit this issue last year that maybe really quick this chart shows the blob target in blue and then the blob count the average blob count per day in orange. And we hit this issue last year that for very like for like I don't know six months or so we actually hit the blob target which means at this point layer 2s could not process more activity without getting significantly more expensive um until we then increase the blob target here with pectra and now we just recently two days ago increased it further with um the first bo fork after fusaka and we will keep increasing it in January I think it'll go up to 14 blobs. Um, but what this basically means is it's a very it's very good news for layer 2s because they can put more data into blobs. Um, and then can they can also scale further. So yeah, that's great stuff. Um, we keep scaling here and then the going back to the timeline again. I think this one is also easy now. It was also already mentioned roughly end of July this year. 10 years. Exactly. Nice. It's not really a technological progress in the sense that we changed anything, but in my opinion, it's crazy important to also celebrate these milestones because um blockchains are about trust in the end, right? And 10 years of uptime shows you can trust this this system that we're building. Um so yeah, happy birthday again Ethereum. Um and great job in case anyone was here also participating any of these hard forks. Um then let's next take a look at layer 2 land. I saw another tweet here just a couple of um yeah a couple of months ago that was like September where this guy here he was kind of concerned that no one even considers building Ethereum layer 2s anymore and he also had the take that if you're a founder don't build on Ethereum. Um I was also surprised reading this basically on X. Um one chart that we track on or one data point that we track on grow the pie is for example the number of layer twos. Anyone any idea how many layer twos we have at the moment? >> Too many >> too many. >> So we have one chart where we filter. That was a very good guess. We show right now 101 layer twos here. And this is already layer 2's filter down to having at least 100,000 in TVL like assets on the chain. Um so I think without the filter we had like roughly 120. So that was very good guess here. Um and yeah so we see since 2020 this chart has been going up quite a bit. We also see a little bit of a correction here. So some L2s are actually like um going down or they stop processing or they stop sequencing block blocks. In my opinion, that's good. Like, we didn't need all of the layer twos that were out there. Um, but overall, we definitely saw like a strong increase in the number of number layer twos live. And we don't need all of these. Um, but we also see lots of bigger names now building or launching their own layer 2s. So, one for them, well, one of them for example is Sonium, which is by Sony, the company that probably any everyone knows here. Then INC is another one which is like a layer two launched by Kraken the exchange. Uni chain is an layer two that was launched by unis swap. And then there was like a couple of news this year that um Robin Hood is going to launch their own layer 2. Um and group um the company behind or the group behind Alibaba already launched their own layer 2 job. And then we also have um Deutsche Bank looking into building their own layer 2 on the CK stack. Um so yeah, lots of like exciting development happening there. Lots of like big names building on Ethereum, building their own layer 2s. Um and I just recently saw an interview with the I think it was the Robin Hood um crypto guy and he basically said that why do they choose layer choose? They like the security benefits. they like how cheap it is for them to run layer 2s and also the customizability that they can still like customize the layer 2 to their own needs. Um and another thing that we're seeing is we're seeing layer ones migrating to become layer 2s. So one of the biggest ones is probably which has been around for like a couple of years and just March this year they migrate to become a layer 2. Then Lisk is another example here and maybe some of you are also familiar with um Ronin the big gaming chain where Axi Infinity is running on they are also going to become a layer 2. Yes. >> Is the term layer 2 now synonymous with superchain? >> No. So super chain is optimism's cluster. Um so there are these different clusters. We have superchain by optimism. We have the or arbitum orbit by arbitum. um basically these different classes that these bigger chain stacks created. Um there's also like from SQ the elastic chain um yeah so super chain is specifically the like op stack layer 2s that also actually have a revenue share with optimism. >> Yes will be a part of arbitum ecosystem. Sorry again. >> Robin will build the on. >> Exactly. Yeah. >> So be part of ecosystem or >> it technically I mean all of them will be part of the great Ethereum ecosystem but it's maybe a little closer to the arbitum ecosystem in that case. Yeah. At least in terms of technology. Yeah. >> Um >> maybe a bit of question about your opinion. Is it more interesting to have uh more new layer tools or so talking about particular if the blob size is increasing? >> Yeah. >> So it's going to benefit uh it's going to make it easier to make new layers to but also going to benefit the existing layers. >> Yes, exactly. It will benefit both. Yeah. >> Which of the two is a better outcome? I think honestly a healthy mix is the best again because I think every layer too as long as they have like a specific target audience or specific like niche or specific distribution channel can also bring new people to to Ethereum and that's also by the way the whole theme behind grow the pie. It's kind of like, okay, making the pie bigger for everyone, right? We're still like a relatively small space and very niche use cases, but um yeah, all of these layer twos are basically BT BD teams for Ethereum in my my case for like my opinion. Yeah. Um okay, then the TPS question was raised somewhere with Visa, right? Um was where was it? Someone mentioned Oh, yeah. you mentioned Visa is processing 65,000 transactions per second. This stuff actually is becoming possible on layer 2 now. Um currently combined L1 25 TBS plus L2s can already reach 30,000 TBS and this 30,000 number is quite high. I'll show you now why. Um we had like one L2 just launched very recently called lighter. Um, lighter is like a very like most of these L2s are EVM equivalent L2s. That means they're general purpose. You can deploy a smart contracts and do stuff the same way you do it on Ethereum. But some of these L2s and lighter is one example here are very appsp specific. So they're very optimized for a very specific use case. Lighter is like a per stacks. Um, and it's just optimized for like just like this use case. And yeah, this one we see here the alltime high number. This one can go up to 30,000 TBS at the moment and it's like a rollup that's actually posting data to Ethereum in blobs. Some L2s don't post data to Ethereum. They post data to all DA layers like DA or Celestia. So they are not rollups. They just general L2s. But lighter is actually like a rollup that posts state diffs directly to to Ethereum Ethereum blobs. So we currently already at 30,000 TPS and I'm not sure if guys here are familiar with Mega ETH for example which will launched their private mainet next week and they are claiming to reach 100,000 TPS. Um so let's see how it works out but I think the scaling road map is really starting to pick up and we're really starting to see more and more TPS and more and more block space which is nice to see on Ethereum. Any questions about layer 2 before we move on to stable coin? Oh yeah, big >> just roughly because GPS is hard for my brain. Is there anything in like bits per second or anything in in storage or that's >> uh it's it's tough because it's not just storage like like the the processing unit is the gas in the end, right? And there is like I mean if you put that it's without lighter because you cannot put like EVM chains use gas. Um and all of this together I think it's roughly 30 million gas per second in EVM gas. But you cannot use the concept of gas with something like lighter because gas usually is like a it it combines execution complexity plus storage plus other things. Yeah. So it's kind of hard to put it into Yeah. more traditional numbers unfortunately. So TPS is the in my opinion the easiest but it's still like obviously like one transaction in lighter is very different from one transaction in base or arbitum. Um but it's still like it's hard to find standards here. Um all right then let's move on to stable coins. Um are people here familiar with stable coins? Yeah. Right. Um maybe just like quickly, stable coins are tokens that can be like transferred on blockchains like usually ERC20 tokens that are one to one packed to like a fiat currency like the US dollar or like euro or something else. Um so they are stable coin issuers like tether or circle and usually for each dollar that they issue onchain they also hold the equivalent dollar in like a bank account or in treasuries basically. Um this chart I put now specifically without any title. What is like does anyone know what it shows? emission >> emission >> settlements >> volume. >> So this is actually the supply the stable coin supply we have currently in the combined Ethereum ecosystem. So the the yeah the gray line here is Ethereum mainet. So most of the stable coin supply in the Ethereum ecosystem is on mainet 92% and then we have 8% on layer 2s at the moment. But we have currently 195 billion in stable coins, which is roughly five times Starbucks yearly revenue. So you could like I don't know give people free coffee for 5 years in all Starbucks um shops for five year. Yeah. For free with this with this money. Um and it you see I just also plotted a line I think. Yeah. You see this is where 2025 started. It also increased quite a bit in 2025. Um, so 2025 also seems to be like a breakout year in terms of like stable coin adoption. Um, it's mostly still US dollar, but we also are seeing some some other currencies slowly popping up. Um, it's probably also like this quick adoption is probably also related to regulation in the US becoming a little easier. But yeah, it's cool to see especially Ethereum is definitely leading in like stable coin supply by far. Um another >> yes >> do we have a rough idea of the supply in nonthereum ecosystem like Solana >> I I think Solana has 8 billion but I'm not sure eight or 10 billion so roughly 5% of that then yeah um but I'm not 100% sure so definitely >> Tron yeah so the second biggest is Tron so Tron the um is also like an EVM chemical equivalent chain right um also used a lot in South America if I'm not mistaken one Africa yeah um they are the second biggest and I think they have roughly I want to say 60 billion so they're also quite big in stable coins which is surprising because Tron is also very very expensive to use um but they just yeah they were just like early movers there yeah um but yeah definitely like double check these numbers um like if you want a general numbers on stable coins definitely go to like D5 Defi Lama for example, they also have like other chains like other non-eum chains listed. Um yeah, something else that I found interesting when we looked into the data about stable coins, we looked into like what are the first contracts that new new users interact with. So when someone creates a new wallet, what is the first contract that they interact with onchain? And this is now for the last seven days on Ethereum mainet. I just took this screenshot today and we see again lots of like stable coin contracts. We see tether, we see circle, we see down here die. Um, so lots of new users. The first interaction onchain is they use a stable coin. They probably mint or transfer stable coin. And then here for example, that's also interesting. Lots of people currently use Ethenet in order to bridge to lighter the L2 that we saw earlier. Sorry, >> lots of people created 100 1,000 new accounts just through coin farming by >> that maybe as well. Yeah, that >> much real >> that could also be the case. Yeah, like it's always tricky unfortunately with incentives then to like measure that >> the new hyperlid. >> Yeah. >> And they just want to environment >> probably. Yeah. Um but still interesting though with the stable coins at least I found this very very interesting um to see what what is the first interaction of users like it could for example be that like someone sends like you create a wallet someone sends you stable coins and then you then send them somewhere else and the first transactions basically you sending the stuff out. So this only counts transactions that were executed by by yourself or by these wallets. And then I have another chart which I put for now without any title. Um, it shows here it's Ethereum mainet. It's stable coin related. It starts in 2018, goes up to like 20 like to now. And we're currently sitting at roughly 40%. >> So what? >> That's the question. Yeah, it's a share. It's a share of something. >> Sorry. >> St. Okay. Yeah. attractions of all >> share of all transactions that >> that's what safely >> nice nice yes that's it very good Khan um 40% of all transactions on Ethereum mainet touch stable coins today which means that either they directly call a stable coin contract and transfer stable coins or they swap into a stable coin swap out of a stable coin swap from one token to another token but routed through a stable coin um whatever but like 40% of all transactions on Ethereum mainet in some sense touch a stable coin which um kind of shows how like fundamental stable coins have become in the in the Ethereum ecosystem. Um any final questions on stable coins before we move on to the next chapter? >> No. >> Yeah. Again, do we have a rough idea? I mean, I guess probably we can check on Bitcoin. I don't know of other chains. Unfortunately, not now. I think Tron is probably 100%. >> USD to USBC. >> Oh, yeah. That's pretty low. I think in the Ethereum ecosystem, we also have these numbers. We just aggregated them. It's like 99.5% is like USD and then we have a little bit of euro lying around there. Um, but this is something we will definitely keep an eye on in like 2026 to see if it's growing. And I think what will also be interesting is like all of these different chains, they have users or whatever. Um, but knowing which stable coins they hold, you might also better understand in which jurisdictions or which countries are your users based, right? >> So, do you have any statistic about the packed stable coins of the last few years? I mean we we I think most of us know like the the Terra Luna uh thing that happened. >> We had usual money. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I I don't have a statistic top of my head unfortunately. No. Um we did more algorithmic stable coins back then as well, right? Which we don't really do anymore. Right now it's really like back then we try to come up with algorithms that like try to keep the pack but now it's really okay we actually keep the dollar reserves or like the issuers keep the dollar reserve so that this can't really happen but yeah I don't have numbers unfortunately. Yes. >> So we're seeing this trend and this hype around stable coins but they've really been around for so long it feels a little bit weird like this noise. It's like, is this is this a representation with like trust in the fact that stable coins are stable or is this some manufactured hype about the fact that hey, we've been here for like six years? >> I think it's it's honestly like a little bit of product market fit here with stable coins for Ethereum or for blockchains in general, right? Um then probably what you see here that it went down is exactly what you said that like people may have lost a little bit of trust in stable coins after the Luna Terra DEC happened. Um but yeah payments is not it's is great. Yeah. Um and people just pref like many people out there still prefer to hold their known currencies versus like yeah Ethereum or something else. I can also bring a little element of response is a lot of stable coin usage. Uh the user are not aware that they're even using stable cocoin. They're using an app like for example now stripe does a lot of things are moving stuff towards stable coin >> like mini pay but it's small but there are apps that leverage ecosystem without necessarily advertising it >> 100%. Yeah. I also just recently we went to San Francisco and like talked to someone there who works for like a fintech startup and they also just like use stable coin in stable coins in their back end just because it's more efficient for them. Um they basically process a lot of yeah a lot of a lot of um assets for their customers but then they use stable coins in the back end for certain things. Um, okay. Then let's move on real quick because I think we're already like a little over time here. Um, to the real world adoption part because I guess that's all what we in the end in the end also care about is do people actually use Ethereum for something? Um, and I just picked two examples here. Um, Shopify allowing payments in USDC on base. So Shopify, I'm assuming most people are familiar with it, like this big like platform where you can like create your own online store. They now allow payments for merchants in USDC and it's it's happening on base, the layer 2 base. Um the volume is still relatively low, but it's increasing. Um so that's a settled UTC volume via the commerce payment protocol on base. Um, and I think they it was just like it's it's still in like a test phase, but I just saw videos from from Jesse that they are like now rolling it out more. And the cool thing here is that Shopify allowing payments on base means that anyone can spin up a Shopify store and they don't have this issue that they also need like a bank account. they can just have like a like a wallet on base where they can receive UCC and it's just like increasing again I guess inclusivity for people that don't have bank accounts um to sell something online and get paid in USC. Um and another example we talked about before briefly is Robin Hood. Um they will launch their own layer 2 but they are already tokenizing stocks on arbitum right now. Um and it's also a chart that's just like going up and to the right for the moment. So we see here the total value of tokenized shares it's currently sitting at roughly 13.6 million. Um but yeah I think the trend is the most interesting thing that more and more stocks are currently being tokenized um on arbitum through Robin Hood. Um nice cool then just also a quick outlook before I close this uh before we come to our verdict whether Ethereum is dead or not. Um because we also had a scaling question again. Um we but what we did a couple of weeks ago, months ago, we just put this like simple chart out there. Um based on the trajectory that like Justin Drake and other smart people at the F are like are like putting out there. Um we want to scale to 10,000 TPS within the next uh five to six years. um which would mean we would reach 100 TPS by April 2027,000 TPS by 2020 by May 2029 and then 10,000 by June 2031. And this is Ethereum mainet. So Ethereum mainet will hopefully reach 10,000 TPS by then. But layer 2 will be in the hundreds of thousands, millions of TPS by that point. And it's just a trade-off. Then in my mind, Ethereum mainet is like high value transfers, slowmoving money. Like if you want to keep all of your savings safe somewhere, maybe put them on layer one and layer twos is more like more use cases, more fast moving money and low value transfers. Um, all right, verdict. Uh, is Ethereum dead in 2025? Is no one building on Ethereum anymore? I'd probably say no. Um, I hope you guys agree. Um but yeah, if you're at any point interested in more like Ethereum ecosystem data, definitely go to growthepai.com, check it out. We should have data on most of the things that are happening in the Ethereum ecosystem, but also always happy about feedback or like about ideas for additional data points. Um yeah, any further questions on any of this? No. You mean price or I I'm I'm I'm always bullish Ethereum. I mean, we have like we have a small team exclusively working in the Ethereum ecosystem and so I've been like bullish for a while. Yeah. Before I worked for liquid crypto fund and we did a bunch of different things, but I'm very happy in the Ethereum ecosystem. Um so yeah, I'm definitely very bullish Ethereum ecosystem long-term also price. Yeah. >> What's the biggest blocker you think? >> The blocker for what exactly? for adoption and anything. >> I think it's as usual or like I think it's been already like that for a while. It's UX. It's still like complicated for users. Most people don't care about crypto and I think we slowly starting to understand that and I think you made a good point that lots of apps are now using also crypto in their backends and people don't really even know that you use crypto and I think that has to become like the standard at least for for um adoption from like end users. >> Yeah. And then I think on like just like regulatory side of course some questions are still open and the big money movements will only happen if we get like pretty clear on the regulatory front. Yeah. Cool. Nice. Thank you.