Visa is one of the largest payment processors in the world. However, in 2021, it was surpassed by the ETH network in terms of the number of transactions processed.
The smart contract blockchain processed 4.5 times more transactions than Visa in 2021. More precisely, the ETH network was able to process over 1.2 million transactions per day. This equates to 15 transactions per second.
Furthermore, according to a recent report, ETH handled the equivalent of US$11.6 trillion worth of transactions in 2021. Meanwhile, Visa carried out transactions estimated at US$10.4 trillion.
It is worth mentioning that ETH had a challenging 2021. After all, the network faced several issues, including scalability and competition from other smart contract platforms such as Solana.
ETH updates and developments
There was also the EIP-1559 update from the London hard fork in August 2021. The event burned 4500 ETH in 24 hours, helping to reduce Gas fees.
By implementing layer 2 scaling solutions, ETH was also able to mitigate its network congestion problem by increasing the number of transactions per second.
Thus, these developments are some of the main reasons that led ETH to achieve such a high transaction volume.
Another factor that boosted the use of the ETH network was the boom in NFTs, which started in 2021 and continues to rise in 2022.
Also favorable to ETH was the recent integration into Twitter. In mid-February the social network completed its integration with Ethereum network wallets. Users will now be able to tip each other in Ether (ETH) as well as in Bitcoin (BTC).
Although the price of ETH is down in 2022, that hasn’t stopped ETH from hitting the record 75 million addresses (not necessarily users) holding some Ether.
According to Glassnode data, the number of addresses with ETH grown up a lot since the official release of the ETH 2.0 blockchain.
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