Base and zkSync Era Outshine Ethereum Mainnet Amidst Bear Market Blues

Ethereum’s layer‑2 solu­tions are out­per­form­ing the blockchain they were designed to bol­ster. Both Base and zkSync Era have shown remark­able per­for­mance so far despite the inces­sant bear market.

For the first time in his­to­ry, Base and zkSync Era sur­passed Ethereum’s Trans­ac­tions Per Sec­ond (TPS) rate of 10.18 on Sep­tem­ber 17th.

• Accord­ing to data com­piled by L2Beat, the Coin­base-incu­bat­ed layer‑2 net­work achieved a TPS of 12.93, mark­ing an impres­sive 49.76% increase with­in just one week.
• Mean­while, Mat­ter Labs’ zero-knowl­edge (zk) rollup tech-pow­ered scal­ing solu­tion close­ly fol­lowed with a TPS of 12.62.
• Over the past month, Base has under­gone a tremen­dous surge in terms of activ­i­ty thanks to the decen­tral­ized social media plat­form Friend.tech. It recent­ly record­ed near­ly $19 mil­lion in trad­ing vol­ume, fur­ther push­ing net­work activ­i­ty on the layer‑2 blockchain.
• So far, Base has attract­ed approx­i­mate­ly $380 mil­lion in total assets locked while record­ing a trad­ing vol­ume of more than $20 mil­lion in the past week.
• Its dai­ly trans­ac­tion count also hit an all-time high above $1.88 mil­lion last week. Dur­ing the same peri­od, Base saw a decline in aver­age trans­ac­tion size which dis­played an increas­ing retail adop­tion and smart con­tract interactions.
• Base even entered the top 10 this week, eclips­ing the promi­nent layer‑1 net­work, Solana.
• Mean­while, zkSync Era became the first zkEVM to be made pub­licly avail­able in March after four years in devel­op­ment, facil­i­tat­ing faster and cheap­er trans­ac­tions. Since then, its TVL has increased to $419 million.