Ethereum’s On-Chain Activity Signals A Historic Finish To 2025 – Here’s What To Know

Despite a prolonged bearish action in the price of Ethereum, the network activity has been demonstrating notable growth and performance over the past few weeks. After reaching a crucial peak in network performance, the leading blockchain could be on the verge of another major achievement.

Another Incoming Record For Ethereum

In a significant development, the on-chain momentum of Ethereum is growing quietly, but convincingly. With rising network performance and utilization, the network is poised to make history, as revealed in a recent research from Leon Waidmann, a market expert and head of research at The On-Chain Foundation.

Even while the Ethereum price has fallen, its ecosystem has managed to handle an increasing amount of activity throughout the year. In the post on X, Waidmann highlighted that the ecosystem is on track to close 2025 with another transaction all-time high in this month of December.

As seen on the chart, the leading network is drawing dangerously close to challenging and beating its previous all-time high once again in the remaining days of this month. Interestingly, this strong performance highlights the ongoing role of ETH as the foundation of on-chain commerce.

Waidmann noted that aggregate Ethereum, with the total transaction count of Layer 2s, is persistently pushing higher. Several other major chains, such as Base, Arbitrum, Optimism (OP), World Chain, and the ETH mainnet, are all contributing meaningfully to the sharp surge in on-chain activity.

In the midst of the growing Ethereum ecosystem, the growth is not fueled by a single outlier, but rather is distributed throughout the stack. These include Decentralized Finance (DeFi), Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), Layer 2 networks, and Real-World Applications (RWA).

ETH Network Is Dominating The DeFi Sector

Ethereum’s network performance extends into the DeFi sector and seems to be leading the charge, surpassing other major blockchains. Following an examination of the dynamic sector, Joseph Young, an Ethereum narrator, disclosed that the blockchain currently controls over 68.2% of all pure DeFi Total Value Locked (TVL). 

Related Reading: Ethereum Takes The Lead In DeFi Lending Revenue, Leaving Rivals Behind – See How

To put it in value, over $69.3 billion has been deployed on smart contracts on ETH. The achievement highlights a fresh surge in capital concentration around the fundamental protocols of the blockchain. This is possible with liquidity, developer activity, and institutional conviction still favoring the network over other chains.

Young stated that the figure is more than the DeFi capital of Solana, Tron, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Bitcoin, Avalanche, and every other chain put together. As a result of this growing dominance, the expert has declared ETH the most trusted settlement layer of finance.

At the time of writing, the price of Ethereum was trading at $2,931, indicating a 1% decline in the last 24 hours. As the price flips negative, trading volume has also turned bearish, falling by over 7% over the past day.