Several of the largest blockchain networks handled more transactions in December even as user fees dropped, which data collected by Nansen shows that recent scaling improvements are increasing capacity and facilitating competition for block space.
Data from Nansen showed that Bitcoin, Tron, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, Avalanche, and The Open Network (TON) saw transactions enhance month over month, while fee revenues declined sharply over the same period.
Ethereum transactions increased by 16% despite a 57% drop in fee revenue. Polygon showed a similar discrepancy, with transaction volume up 82% and fees down 47%. Arbitrum and Avalanche have also shown a very noticeable trend of increases and decreases in transaction fees.
Tron, Bitcoin, and TON saw more modest transaction growth of 0.6%, 7.7%, and 7.9%, respectively. However, these networks have also seen a decline in fee revenue, reinforcing a broader trend of easing pressure on network block space usage.
The trends point to a structural shift in the way blockchains cope with demand. Scaling updates, rollups, and cheaper runtimes increased capacity without causing bottlenecks and bidding wars for inclusion.
According to Nansen’s AI assist section, percentage change data is not a strict month-to-month comparison, but reflects changes from recent activity baselines.
As a result, piercing reversals or outflows may be recorded as declines greater than 100%, representing a net negative flow of business momentum rather than literal “negative trades.”
Transaction volumes are rising as fee pressure on major chains eases
On November 27, Ethereum raised its block gas limit to 60 million, allowing more transactions and contract calls to fit into each block, reducing congestion.
The effect was amplified in December with Fusaka’s update, which introduced PeerDAS to dramatically enhance data availability and reduce rollup costs, reducing overall charging pressure even as activity increases.
Polygon showed a similar pattern after implementing the Madhugiri tough fork in early December. As previously reported by Cointelegraph, the update reduced consensus time to one second and was intended to enhance throughput by up to 33% while increasing the efficiency and predictability of gas-intensive operations.
The network has placed updates around stablecoins and real-world asset (RWA) tokenization, which tend to generate more habitual but less urgent transactions that enhance volumes without increasing fees.
Meanwhile, Avalanche’s performance appears to be the result of a combination of ecosystem activities.
Nansen Research Avalanche Ecosystem Report showed that the growth in online transactions can be attributed to stablecoin payments, institutional settlements and consumer platforms such as ticketing and gaming.
These employ cases generate high throughput but little competition for block space, allowing transaction volume to enhance while fees decrease.
Meanwhile, the Arbitrum pattern reflects the economics of scaling rollups. The network groups transactions off-chain and sends compressed data to Ethereum, allowing transaction volumes to enhance without a commensurate enhance in fees.
Its fee market design separates execution costs from the data costs of Ethereum connections, limiting fee variability even under higher loads.
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Not all networks had the same discrepancy
While several major blockchains saw higher transactions as fees dropped, others saw a concurrent decline in activity and fee revenue, reflecting a quieter onchain environment over the past 30 days.
BNB Chain had piercing decline, the number of transactions dropped by 79% and fees by 14%.
Base and HyperEVM saw some of the steepest drops in activity. Core transactions dropped 75% and fee revenue dropped 63%. HyperEVM performed similarly, with transactions down 119% and fees down 46%, suggesting reduced short-term usage throughout December.
Solana remained the busiest network with 1.7 billion transactions; According to Nansen, even this result represented a decline of 21% month-on-month. Similarly, fee revenues declined by 17%.
These synchronized declines are in line with broader cryptocurrency market conditions. According to According to CoinGecko, the overall cryptocurrency market capitalization ranged from $2.9 trillion to $3.1 trillion in December.
As prices, volatility and capital turnover remain stagnant, onchain activity on networks has cooled in parallel.
Warehouse: Fusaka Ethereum fork explained for dummies: what the hell is PeerDAS?
