Inscriptions craze buoys zkSync over Ethereum mainnet in 30-day transactions

Dec 28, 2023 at 6:02 PM UTC

Edited by Brian Stone

News

Ethereum’s network was outclassed by a layer-2 scaling solution in monthly transactions for the first time.

zkSync processed more transactions than the Ethereum mainnet in the past 30 days, according to L2beat data. The network recorded 34.7 million transactions within a month, about 500,000 more than Ethereum, which handled 34.2 million in the same period.

Arbitrum’s network came third after zkSync and Ethereum with 31.4 million monthly transactions as of reporting time.

Inscriptions craze buoys zkSync over Ethereum mainnet in 30-day transactions - 1 — Top 3 chains for Ethereum transactions | Source: L2Beat

zkSync’s triumph marked the first time an L2 network surpassed Ethereum’s mainnet for monthly transactions. This was likely achieved thanks to the growing inscription trends from the Bitcoin network following developments by Casey Rodarmor and Domo, a pseudonymous blockchain builder.

L2beat’s dashboard showed that zkSync saw its largest single-day transaction uptick on Dec. 16, the same day inscriptions were enabled on the L2 scaling network.

Rodarmor created the Ordinals protocol that allowed users to embed files in call data on Bitcoin (BTC). Domo expanded on this idea with the BRC-20 token standard to birth token issuance and NFTs on BTC’s network, akin to ERC-20 and defi on Ethereum.

Since the first half of 2023, when inscriptions and ordinals debuted, the technology has spread to other blockchains, including Ethereum and Solana, sometimes causing network outages and sequencer issues like on Arbtrium.

Ender Lu, CTO of Morph L2 and a former Binance Chain core developer stressed the need for more decentralized blockchain sequencers to mitigate future network downtime.

Lu noted that this crucial piece of blockchain architecture leaned more towards centralization, warning that this spurs censorship concerns within Ethereum’s community and the broader blockchain ecosystem.

If the block builders become more centralized, there’s a risk of complete censorship. It is very important to decentralize the block builder by developing distributed validator technology.
Ender Lu, CTO of Morph L2