The Ethereum ecosystem boasts approximately nine times the daily active users it did only four years ago; experts believe the growing demand will help ETH soar.

Significant Growth in Daily Active Users

Data gathered by crypto ETF issuer Bitwise indicates that, with the lion’s share coming from the Ethereum layer-1 mainnet, Ethereum and its scaling solutions, Arbitrum and Polygon, had an average daily active user base of more than 250,000 in Q1 2020.

Now including the since-launched layer-2 networks Optimism, Base, and zkSync, this daily user count as of the first quarter of 2024 surpassed around 2.25 million, approximately nine times bigger.

Pushing transactions to L2s has caused Ethereum to have a considerably lower fraction of daily active users.

The Ethereum mainnet had 378,000 active users on June 4; Polygon had 1.3 million; and the other four L2s recorded overall about 1.5 million active users.

Ethereum’s Scaling and Future Potential

Late 2021 brought optimism; the zkSync mainnet and Base began to be accessible to the public in 2023.

Although Ethereum’s user count doesn’t seem very good, co-founder Vitalik Buterin is focused on scaling the main blockchain via L2s, so this is part of the plan even though the user count doesn’t seem very good.

He recently claimed that L2s resemble the sharding idea of the previous Eth 2 design and that the layer may potentially support expansion in several “subcultures” inside the Ethereum network.

Price Predictions and Market Dynamics

Concurrently, VanEck, the maker of the crypto ETF, has set a price goal for Ethereum based on projections of the coin reaching $22,000 by 2030.

Matthew Sigel and two colleagues, the analysts, raised their 2030 expectations for Ether—up from just $11,800 last year—noting that its revenue per user exceeds most Web2 companies and is set to grow in popularity among traditional financial market participants as well as with Big Tech in a June 5 blog published by VanEck’s head of digital assets research.

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“We believe spot ether ETFs will soon be approved for trading on US stock exchanges. This breakthrough would enable institutional investors and financial advisers to own this special asset […] and gain from the price and liquidity benefits typical of ETFs,” the experts noted.

“We estimate ETH’s 2030 valuation depending on a projection of $66B in free cashflows generated by Ethereum and accruing to the ETH token,” the experts said.

Ethereum’s Revenue and Fee Dynamics

Referring to it as a “modern miracle,” bankless co-founder Ryan Sean Adams pointed out that the Ethereum blockchain earns three times more fees than top-layer 2 networks and Solana combined, despite reduced user counts.

By paying Ethereum fees to resolve transactions on the main chain, the L2s gain from its security.

Though others caution that inflows into the new crypto ETFs will be substantially less than the Bitcoin ETFs, many hope the introduction of spot Ether ETFs will ultimately drive the price of Ether to a new all-time high.