Hey folks,
Ethereum is the backbone of the crypto industry, but it has a serious traffic jam issue. Every transaction competes for limited block space, which increases fees and slows down confirmations.
Right now, Ethereum handles about 1.6 million transactions a day, up about 40% from a year ago. For context, Visa processes about 639 million transactions daily (233.8 billion in fiscal 2024). Ethereum still has a long way to go before it can match traditional payment rails.
Layer 2s are here to close that gap. They act like express lanes next to the Ethereum highway. Transactions are processed off the main chain and bundled back into Ethereum.
Most Layer 2s use a system called rollups, where many transactions are packed together and submitted to Ethereum as one. The result: cheaper fees, faster speed, and the same Ethereum security. Already, over 50–60% of Ethereum’s activity is happening on these networks.
How they work
Think of a rollup as a busy side road that merges onto a highway. Transactions run on the side road, then a single bundle hits the highway. That bundle includes the data Ethereum needs to check. There are two main types of rollups on Ethereum today: Optimistic rollups and Zero-Knowledge (ZK) rollups.
Using this road analogy, optimistic rollups assume every car on the road is in good condition. Only if someone raises a flag does a mechanic pull the car over. That is the fraud-proof system.
ZK rollups are different. Each car arrives with a sealed inspection report stuck to its windshield. Ethereum never has to stop the car because the proof shows it is road-worthy from the start.
From here, the story shifts to the tokens themselves, the projects building these express lanes, and the teams and backers behind them.
Arbitrum (ARB)
Arbitrum is the largest Layer 2 by usage and liquidity. ARB uses the Optimistic rollup.
Built by Offchain Labs, founded by Ed Felten, Steven Goldfeder, and Harry Kalodner. It raised $120M in a Series B led by Lightspeed, with backers like Polychain, Pantera, Alameda, Ribbit, and Mark Cuban. Launched in 2021, it now powers top DeFi apps like GMX and Uniswap.
Arbitrum has recently been averaging around 1.6–1.7 million transactions per day in mid-September 2025.
Optimism (OP)
Optimism runs an optimistic rollup and built the OP Stack, which powers networks like Coinbase’s Base. Founded by Jinglan Wang, Karl Floersch, and Kevin Ho. It raised $150M in March 2022 from a16z and Paradigm.
Optimism is currently processing about 900,000 to 1 million transactions daily as of September 2025.
Starknet (STRK)
Starknet is a ZK rollup by StarkWare, founded by Eli Ben-Sasson and Uri Kolodny. It uses STARK proofs, cryptography that scales fast and resists quantum attacks. StarkWare raised $282.5 million, including a $100M Series D at an $8B valuation. Its ecosystem spans DeFi, payments, and gaming.
Starknet daily transactions have reached as high as 900,000, although averages are lower, according to recent reports.
zkSync (ZK)
zkSync is a ZK rollup from Matter Labs, led by Alex Gluchowski. It launched in 2019 and is built for developer ease and performance. The team raised $50M in 2021 from a16z, followed by $200M in Series C with Lightspeed, Variant, and a16z.
zkSync Era, the current, full-featured version of the project, has shown peaks of over 5 million transactions in a day, though averages are lower depending on the source.
Together, these projects highlight the two main rollup paths Ethereum is betting on, each solving the same scaling problem in different ways.
Optimistic and ZK rollups take different routes, but both are vital. Since proto-danksharding in 2024, fees have dropped and adoption has surged. Layer 2 tokens are not just scaling tools.
They are shaping how Ethereum can serve billions of users and how crypto will compete with the scale of Visa. And the momentum is clear; on August 12, 2024, the L2 ecosystem hit a peak of 12.42 million transactions in a single day, according to reports, showing just how critical these networks have become for Ethereum’s future.
Over the past week, Bitcoin stayed above $115,000 amid optimism around a likely 25bps Fed rate cut. Ethereum hovered near $4,500, while altcoins like Solana, Dogecoin, and Avalanche led the rally.
Weekly price movement:
BTC $115,517 ⏫ 3.81% (7d)
ETH $4,563 ⏫ 6.35% (7d)
SOL $237 ⏫ 14.26% (7d)
DOGE $0.2640 ⏫ 13.12% (7d)
AVAX $28.75 ⏫ 15.39% (7d)
(All data here as of 1:55 p.m., 15 September 2025)
Before we conclude, here’s a quick look at some important news from around the crypto world.
The Ethereum Foundation has released a roadmap to bring end-to-end privacy features to the Ethereum network, a layer-1 (L1) smart contract blockchain, and rebranded its “Privacy and Scaling Explorations” initiative to “Privacy Stewards of Ethereum” (PSE). PSE said it aims to bring privacy solutions to the protocol, infrastructure, networking, application, and wallet layers in the announcement, and laid out several key goals for the next 3-6 months, according to Cointelegraph.
Nasdaq, the world’s second-largest exchange by market capitalization, is seeking regulatory approval from the US securities regulator to list tokenized stocks. Nasdaq filed a request on Sept. 8 with the SEC asking for a rule change that would allow the company to list tokenized stocks. The exchange operator specifically asked to amend certain rules, including the definition of a security, to trade tokenized stocks under the same execution and documentation rules as traditional securities, provided the tokenized versions are deemed equivalent, according to Cointelegraph.
That’s it for now. Thanks for sticking around.
See you later, folks! 👋