Ethereum L2s entered a brutal post-blob era in 2025, where collapsing fees turned scaling into a knife fight. Despite shrinking profits, Base, Arbitrum, Polygon, Optimism, and Starknet emerged as the Big 5 by capturing real users, apps, and revenue.

In 2025, a series of Ethereum upgrades that massively expanded blob data capacity drove Layer 2 (L2) data costs toward zero, triggering an intense competitive shakeout among rollups where only a handful of networks with real users and revenue emerged as clear leaders. By late 2025, Base, Arbitrum, Polygon, Optimism, and Starknet had consolidated into a de facto "Big 5" of Ethereum scaling, distinguished by high transaction throughput, meaningful application ecosystems, and measurable fee/MEV revenue despite falling margins. The backdrop is Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap and the blob fee market created by EIP‑4844 and subsequent upgrades like Pectra and Fusaka, which increased blob capacity per block and pushed L2 transaction fees to fractions of a cent. After Pectra in May 2025, the target and maximum blobs per block rose to 6 and 9, and real usage remained below target, making blobs “virtually free” again and slashing data availability costs for rollups. This meant that most incremental value in the stack accrued at the L2 sequencer level rather than Ethereum L1, with networks like Base becoming major revenue generators; one 2025 analysis estimates Base alone captured roughly 62% of total L2 revenue, even as many L2 governance tokens declined more than 50% in price that year. At the same time, L2s took over the bulk of Ethereum activity, with over 95% of Ethereum-related transactions occurring on rollups and L2 fees dropping below $0.01, making everyday payments and DeFi activity viable at scale. This combination of near-zero marginal costs, commoditized blockspace, and intense competition forced L2s into what some commentators termed a “knife fight” for real usage, durable economics, and ecosystem depth rather than narrative-driven valuations. In that environment, Base, Arbitrum, Polygon, Optimism, and Starknet separated from a crowded field by attracting significant TVL and app ecosystems, building recognizable brands, and demonstrating more robust fee and MEV capture models, while many smaller or more speculative L2s struggled to justify their tokens’ valuations in a post-blob, low-fee regime. For Ethereum as a whole, this marked the transition from proving that rollups can scale the network to proving which rollups can operate as sustainable businesses within an increasingly competitive, high-throughput environment. "entities":["Ethereum","Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) rollups","Base","Arbitrum","Polygon","Optimism","Starknet","EIP-4844","Pectra upgrade","Fusaka upgrade","blobs / blob transactions","Ethereum rollup-centric roadmap","Galaxy Research","Binance Research / Binance Square","Ethereum Foundation"]}`'}

✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

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