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Ethereum’s fee revenue cratered. The network pulled in roughly $64 million in the second quarter — down 51% from the $131 million it earned in the same period a year earlier, per a new report from Bitwise. And yet, transactions were flying.
The network processed 203.9 million transactions during the quarter. That’s up sharply from 121.1 million in the second quarter of the prior year. Throughput climbed too, hitting 26 transactions per second versus 15 the year before. The driver? Ethereum’s block gas limit got bumped up to 60 million, which basically opened the lanes wider and let more traffic through without jacking up costs. Bitwise researchers called the gap between revenue and activity the defining theme of the quarter — protocol changes made blockspace cheaper and more plentiful, so users paid less per transaction even as they used the network more. That’s not a bad trade-off for users. It’s just a rougher one for anyone watching the dollar revenue line.
Lower fees, more transactions. Not the same thing as a dying network.
ETH-Denominated Revenue Actually Rose
Here’s where it gets a bit more interesting. Dollar revenue fell, sure — but revenue measured in ETH actually went up for the first time in over a year. It climbed from 27,670 ETH in the first quarter to 31,166 ETH in the second quarter. The drop in dollar terms had a lot to do with ETH’s price weakening over the period. So the network was earning more in its own unit of account, even if that unit bought fewer dollars at the time. That’s probably a distinction worth making before writing off Ethereum’s quarter entirely.
Staking kept climbing too. Active stakes hit a new record of 40.2 million ETH, which works out to about 33% of the total supply. Bitwise tied that to ongoing institutional interest in the network — and it’s hard to argue with a fresh all-time high on that front, whatever the fee revenue chart looks like.
Solana and Avalanche Saw the Same Pattern
Ethereum wasn’t alone in this. Solana processed 9.8 billion non-voting transactions during the quarter — near its peak levels — while its dollar revenue dropped too. Avalanche’s C-Chain handled 236 million transactions, up from just 58 million a year earlier. Fees there fell as well, with Bitwise attributing the drop to reduced congestion rather than any pullback in actual usage.
So it’s a pattern, not a one-off. Across multiple major networks, transaction volumes are running high while dollar-denominated revenue lags. Bitwise’s read on it: lower fees don’t necessarily mean the network is struggling. They can just mean the network got more efficient, or that pricing dynamics shifted, or both.
That’s a reasonable take. It’s also a convenient one for anyone bullish on these protocols, so it’s worth holding it at arm’s length a little. The fee revenue drop is real. $131 million to $64 million in twelve months is a big move. Whether efficiency gains explain it fully — unclear.
What’s not unclear is the throughput story. Going from 15 to 26 transactions per second is a meaningful jump, and the expanded block gas limit made that possible without proportionally higher costs for users. That’s the whole point of scaling, basically — do more, charge less per unit, keep people on the network. Ethereum seems to be threading that needle, at least on the activity side.
The staking number is worth sitting with too. 40.2 million ETH locked up as active stakes, representing a third of total supply. That’s not a network people are abandoning. Institutional participation, per Bitwise, kept pushing that figure higher through the quarter.
And the ETH revenue figure — 31,166 ETH in Q2 versus 27,670 ETH in Q1 — is the kind of detail that gets buried under the louder dollar headline. It’s probably more telling about network health than the dollar number, since ETH is what validators actually earn and what protocol economics run on. The dollar conversion just happened to look ugly because the price was soft.
Bitwise’s full report covers the cross-network comparison in more depth, but the core finding is pretty consistent across Ethereum, Solana, and Avalanche: activity up, dollar revenue down, and efficiency changes doing most of the explaining. Active Ethereum stakes sat at 40.2 million ETH at quarter’s end.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How much did Ethereum’s transaction volume grow year-over-year?
Ethereum processed 203.9 million transactions in the second quarter, up from 121.1 million in the same quarter a year earlier, with throughput rising from 15 to 26 transactions per second.
Why did Ethereum’s dollar revenue fall if transactions increased?
Per Bitwise, protocol changes made blockspace cheaper and more plentiful, so users paid less per transaction; the drop in ETH’s price during the period also pushed the dollar figure lower even as ETH-denominated revenue rose.
