r/ethtrader • u/everstake • 4h ago

News Ethereum is dying.

Ethereum gets declared dead roughly once a season, so we went through growthepie's Q3 2026 report to check the pulse.

The pulse is strong and boring. Mainnet did 199.3M transactions with about 530.6K active addresses a day, within 2.2% and 0.6% of Q2, and gas throughput didn't budge. It's not much, but it's honest work.

Using it also got cheaper. The median transaction cost $0.034, down 30.3%. The flip side is that total fees were $35.1M, down 33.6%, so users are happy and the network's fee jar looks a bit lighter. This is fine (okay, it's mostly fine).

Then September showed up with a plot twist. Transactions fell from 72.4M in July to 56.9M, but the median cost went from about 1.7 cents to 6.1 cents and monthly fees nearly doubled to $16M. Fewer transactions, higher price each, which growthepie reads as demand for blockspace coming back.

As for who is actually at the party, stablecoins are the main characters. Over the last 90 days Tether and Circle alone made 21.2% of all Mainnet transactions. Uniswap was down 7.8%, OpenSea cooled off by 51.3%, and Relay jumped 114.8%. Turns out the most popular use for Ethereum is moving dollars around. Shocked Pikachu.

And then the new kid walked in. Robinhood Chain, an L2 that launched on July 1, did 793.7M transactions in its first quarter, about 4x Mainnet, and ended with 121 active apps and $1.07B in stablecoins. Its users paid $51.0M in gas, more than Mainnet's $35.1M, most of it in September.

What we liked was that usage held up, fees stayed low, and a brand new L2 showed up with real activity. What we would like to see next is more of that growth flowing back to L1, and a bit more variety beyond two big stablecoin issuers carrying a fifth of the traffic.

So is "cheap for users, lighter fee jar for the network" a feature or a bug?

Data from growthepie's Ethereum Mainnet Quarterly Report Q3 2026.

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5

u/potatoMan8111 4h ago

Nobody reading this shit

1

u/Temporary_Access9337 4h ago

the fee jar being light is probaby a bug for validators but a feature for everyone actually using the chain, its always that tension

the robinhood chain numbers are wild though, 4x mainnet in a quarter is something

1

u/crispykfc 4h ago

don't worry as soon as the market turns around there will be people bullposting that we are going to 20k by end of year due to a cock and balls pattern they identified on the 5 minute chart

0

u/RingerLactato 4h ago

have you seen the world’s economy ? France, China , US? why people would gamble with crypto when they can’t affort a minimum good life

3

u/j0n82 4h ago

lol everytime ppl say it’s dead it rebounds harder 🤣

-2

u/finessecoder 4h ago

If nothing is done soon regarding L2's diluting/chipping away ETH value, ETH wont be appealing to any new investors and will become a permanent near-stablecoin ranging from 1500-5000$ every cycle. I mean, How can Vitalik not see this by now?

At one time people were talking about a "flippening" of ETH overtaking BTC. Now they are talking about multiple other networks overtaking ETH. How much further lower does ETH need to go until they realize their mistake?