Logan Jastrzemski, an investor and co-founder of Frictionless Capital, stated in an interview on Could 20 that Ethereum is “virtually lifeless” and that “the second layer (L2) community is a failed experiment.”
The technical argument offered by Jastremski is as follows. L2 solely works for knowledge compression:
When you concentrate on blockchain, I all the time considered blockchain as knowledge compression as a result of that is what the precise blockchain is. What’s a transaction? A transaction is only a sure variety of bytes. I am going to ship you $10. That is represented by 5 bytes and have to be propagated all through the blockchain. And all L2 does is say, “I can compress these 5 bytes into 1 byte.”
Logan Jastremski, Reversalist.
From that interpretation, Jastremski argued that L2’s worth proposition is unnecessary in any respect. If the actual perform of L2 is to compress knowledge, chains with better capability than these networks will try this job higher and at scale. “If you wish to use blockchain compression, why not apply it to high-performance chains, the place you possibly can compress extra knowledge?
Logan additional argued that Ethereum didn’t “decline” for technical causes, however as a result of it was adopted early. would have been pushed by financial incentivesnot resulting from superiority of design.
I feel Ethereum is primarily a product of the individuals who made cash on Ethereum within the early days, myself included. However from an institutional perspective and a product use case perspective, Ethereum is nearly lifeless to me. I feel it can proceed to slowly disappear, and I feel it is essentially the most overvalued asset on the earth.
Logan Jastremski, Reversalist.
Vadim, a researcher and developer within the cryptocurrency ecosystem, denied the paper’s technical foundation. Jastremski believes that L2 doesn’t exist to compress knowledge, however moderately confuses its impact with its goal. Inheriting the safety of Ethereum mainnetIn response to Vadim, compression is a secondary consequence of the financial mannequin of knowledge availability.
L2 pays Ethereum for cost safety, not knowledge effectivity. Compression is a facet impact of knowledge availability economics, not the objective.
Vadim, researcher and developer.
What does the Ethereum ecosystem’s on-chain knowledge present?
Opposite to what investor Logan stated, enhancements launched by Pectra (Could 2025) and later Fusaka (December 2025) made the principle community accessible, as reported by CriptoNoticias. The community maintains the bottom charge ranges whereas sustaining all-time excessive ranges (ATH) for transactions and lively accounts.
April 2026 was the month through which Ethereum processed essentially the most month-to-month transactions in its whole historical past. Roughly 73 million operations in complete. As of Could twenty first, this metric displays roughly 42 million transactions, indicating that the fifth month of the 12 months might be down in comparison with April.
Nonetheless, since January of final 12 months, when the ATH of lively accounts exceeded 15 million, this statistic has continued to pattern negatively each month thus far. On the time of writing this text, Ethereum registers roughly 6 million lively addressesin response to knowledge from the Develop the Pie platform.
And what about L2?
Exercise metrics for Base and Arbitrum, the 2 hottest Ethereum L2s, present a continued decline in on-chain knowledge.
For Base, the variety of transactions reached an all-time excessive in November 2025, with roughly 453 million transactions processed that month. April final 12 months Marked 235 million instances, down 48%. As of Could twenty first, this quantity stood at 165 million, and month-to-month closings are anticipated to be even decrease.
Arbitrum adopted an analogous trajectory. The earlier highest variety of transactions was 123 million in February 2026. Within the first 21 days of Could, Lower than 30 million instances have been processed, down greater than 75% from its peak..
Equally, the lively addresses for each networks are additionally they’re going down by the month As seen within the following graph. As of this writing, Base has registered 4 million lively addresses and Arbitrum has roughly 1.46 million lively addresses.
A doable clarification for this decline is the lower cost and improved efficiency that the Ethereum community itself has seen in current months, which can scale back the inducement to function within the second tier.
If that studying is right, as Logan advised, the decline of L2 wouldn’t replicate a failure of the ecosystem, however moderately a shift in exercise to the basal layer.
