One developer refuted Jastremski, saying he confuses the impact of the L2 with its goal.
Ethereum on-chain information displays excessive ranges of exercise in L1 and sustained decline in L2.
Logan Jastremski, investor and co-founder of Frictionless Capital, said in an interview on Could 20 that Ethereum “is generally lifeless” and that “second layer (L2) networks have been a failed experiment.”
The technical argument offered by Jastremski was that L2 would act just for information compression:
I all the time noticed them as information compression, as a result of if you concentrate on blockchains, that is what they are surely. What’s a transaction? All a transaction is is a sure variety of bytes. I am sending you 10 {dollars}. That’s represented in 5 bytes that I’ve to propagate to your entire blockchain. And all an L2 does is say: I can compress these 5 bytes to at least one byte.
Logan Jastremski, inversionist.
From that studying, Jastremski maintained that the worth proposition of L2s by no means made sense: if their actual operate is to compress information, a series with higher capability than these networks would do this job higher and on a bigger scale. “If you wish to use blockchain compression, why not apply it to a high-performance chain? There you’ll be able to compress extra information.
Moreover, Logan maintained that Ethereum didn’t “decline” for technical causes however as a result of its early adoption would have been pushed by financial incentivesnot by design superiority.
I feel Ethereum is generally an artifact of people that made cash on it within the early days, together with me. However from an institutional standpoint and from a product use case standpoint, Ethereum is generally lifeless in my thoughts. I feel it’s going to proceed to die slowly and I feel it’s the most overvalued asset on the planet.
Logan Jastremski, inversionist.
Vadim, researcher and developer of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, rejected the technical foundation of that thesis. For him, Jastremski confuses the impact with the aim, since L2 don’t exist to compress information however fairly to inherit the safety of the Ethereum mainnetand compression is a secondary consequence of the financial mannequin of information availability, in response to Vadim.
L2s pay Ethereum for settlement safety, not information effectivity. Compression is a facet impact of the economics of information availability, not the purpose.
Vadim, researcher and developer.
What does the on-chain information of the Ethereum ecosystem present?
In distinction to what was said by the investor Logan, and as CriptoNoticias has been reporting, the enhancements launched by Pectra (Could 2025) and later Fusaka (December 2025), allowed the principle community to succeed in all-time excessive ranges (ATH) in transactions and energetic accounts whereas the community maintains minimal payment ranges.
April 2026 was the month wherein Ethereum processed its highest variety of month-to-month transactions in its complete historical past, with a complete of just about 73 million operations. As of Could 21, this metric displays about 42 million transactions, so the fifth month of the yr in all probability represents a drop in comparison with April.
Nonetheless, since final January, after the ATH in energetic accounts exceeded 15 million, on this statistic the pattern grew to become damaging month after month till at this time. On the time of this writing, the principle layer of Ethereum registers about 6 million energetic addressesin response to information from the Develop the Pie platform.
And the L2?
The exercise metrics of Base and Arbitrum, the 2 most used Ethereum L2s, present a sustained drop of their on-chain information.
Base, for its half, reached its historic most of transactions in November 2025 with virtually 453 million processed that month. Final April marked 235 million, a drop of 48%. As of Could 21, the determine stands at 165 million, which tasks an excellent decrease month-to-month closing.
Arbitrum adopted an identical trajectory. Its historic most was 123 million transactions in February 2026. Within the first 21 days of Could processed lower than 30 million, a drop of greater than 75% from that peak.
Likewise, the energetic addresses of each networks additionally they’re falling month by month as seen within the following graph. On the time of this writing, Base registers 4 million energetic addresses and Arbitrum about 1.46 million.
A potential rationalization for that drop is the decreasing worth and efficiency enhancements that the Ethereum community itself has seen in current months, which would cut back the motivation to function on secondary layers.
If that studying is right, the decline of L2 wouldn’t mirror ecosystem failure, as Logan advised, however fairly a shift of exercise towards the bottom layer.
