Ethereum processed 18.7 million transactions in a single week, the most the network has ever recorded, while the median transaction cost fell to an all-time low of $0.008. ETH's price has not tracked that activity: the token has been trading below $2,400 as of April 2026.
Ethereum just posted 18.7 million transactions in a single week, the highest figure the network has ever recorded. The median cost of a transaction fell to $0.008 over the same stretch, an all-time low — less than a penny per transaction on the world's largest smart contract platform.
What pushed activity to a record
The record-setting week didn't come out of nowhere. Ethereum's daily transaction peaks approached 2.9 million back in January 2026. The network also processed over 200 million transactions in Q1 2026 alone.
That fee collapse traces back to network upgrades activated in 2025: Pectra and Fusaka, both 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. Blockworks had previously reported comparable weekly highs of roughly 18.66 million transactions earlier in 2026, and multiple analytics platforms have confirmed the trend of elevated transaction volumes compared to previous years.
ETH's price hasn't followed the usage
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.
Cheap blockspace weakens the EIP-1559 burn
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.
Therefore the ultra-low fees compound the 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.
Source: Crypto Briefing
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