Ethereum Does 15 TPS. Rollups Are Now the Front Door.

Ethereum's base chain handles roughly 15 transactions per second. That single number explains almost everything about how the network prices itself. When demand spikes, blockspace turns into a bidding war and normal users get squeezed out. In May 2022 a plain token swap could run you $40. That's not a typo.

Rollups solve the arithmetic by pushing execution somewhere else. Transactions get processed away from the base chain, bundled together, then posted back to Ethereum as compressed data or a validity proof. You inherit Ethereum's security without paying layer one prices for every trade. That's the whole trick.

The economics changed hard on March 13, 2024. Dencun went live with EIP-4844, handing rollups dedicated blobspace for posting data. Fees on Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism collapsed to fractions of a cent on quiet days. Activity followed the cheap gas. Rollups now clear several times more daily transactions than Ethereum mainnet does, and the gap widens every quarter.

Here's my take: calling these things layer 2s undersells what they've become. They're the front door. Nobody opens mainnet to do anything. They open Base, and Ethereum quietly handles settlement behind a curtain they'll never look behind.

But the base layer pays for that convenience. Blob fees are cheap on purpose, so they burn almost nothing, and the fee-burn thesis gets thinner every month. Sequencer revenue is the business now, and it's concentrated in a handful of operators running the same stack. That's a centralization trade nobody's eager to say out loud.

And the next stress test is machines. If agents have wallets, who holds the keys? Agentic payments running at inference speed will settle wherever it's cheapest, which means rollups. The compute layer needs a payment rail.

Watch blob demand. If it saturates, every rollup's fees climb at once, and the cheap-gas story gets expensive fast.