As 2025 draws to a close, Ethereum has handed over an answer sheet with both achievements and hidden dangers. The single-day Layer1 transaction volume has reached 1.913 million, a new high for the year, and the total transaction volume of the entire ecosystem has reached 2.2 million, which is a historical figure. What's even more exaggerated is that the average transaction fee is only 17 cents - three or four years ago, this was simply a fantasy.

Remember May 2022? At that time, the gas fee for a single transaction on Ethereum could soar to $200, and such high costs directly blocked ordinary users, and ecological expansion fell into a dilemma. The great contrast between today and today shows how deep the problem is.

What happened? The answer lies in Ethereum's ongoing technological iterations. In November, the block gas limit was raised to 60 million, and the Fusaka upgrade in December introduced cutting-edge technologies such as PeerDAS. The simultaneous evolution of Layer2's expansion solution and the underlying protocol truly reduces the participation cost of users. Small transfers and frequent interactions have become a reality, and the user experience of core applications such as DeFi and NFT has also been greatly improved, igniting the enthusiasm of developers and users.

However, there are two hard wounds hidden behind the prosperity. On the one hand, converting 2.2 million daily transactions into TPS (transactions per second) yields only about 25, which is still a significant gap compared to Visa and Mastercard's throughput of 10,000 levels. This shows that although the network congestion problem has been alleviated, there is still a long way to go in the benchmarking of the global payment system.

The data is eye-catching, but the ceiling is still clear. Ethereum's progress is real, but more technological breakthroughs and ecological construction are needed before it is truly mass-adoption.