Ethereum just posted 18.7 million transactions in a single week, the highest figure the network has ever recorded. At the same time, the median cost of a transaction fell to $0.008, an all-time low. For context, that’s less than a penny per transaction on the world’s largest smart contract platform.

What’s driving the surge

The record-setting week didn’t come out of nowhere. Ethereum’s daily transaction peaks approached 2.9 million back in January 2026, and the network processed over 200 million transactions in Q1 2026 alone.

The fee collapse traces back to network upgrades activated in 2025. The Pectra and Fusaka upgrades were specifically designed to improve layer-1 scalability and reduce transaction costs.

Stablecoin usage and staking participation have been identified as key drivers of the activity boom.

Token Terminal flagged the milestone figures, and Blockworks had previously reported comparable weekly highs of roughly 18.66 million transactions earlier in 2026. Multiple analytics platforms have confirmed the trend of elevated transaction volumes compared to previous years.

The price paradox

Despite all this record-breaking activity, ETH has been trading below $2,400 as of April 2026.

Much of the economic activity happening on Ethereum isn’t directly benefiting ETH’s price. A significant portion of transactions are migrating to layer-2 solutions, which settle on Ethereum but don’t generate the same fee revenue for the base layer.

Stablecoins are among the most-used assets on the network, but their growth doesn’t automatically translate into demand for ETH itself. Users can transact heavily in USDC or USDT without ever needing to hold meaningful amounts of the native token.

The ultra-low fees compound this problem. When median transaction costs are less than a penny, the network burns very little ETH through its fee mechanism. Ethereum’s EIP-1559 burn mechanism, which was supposed to make ETH deflationary during periods of high usage, becomes far less potent when each transaction costs $0.008.