Ethereum''s scaling networks have stopped competing on the same scoreboard, which is how three of them can each claim to be winning.
A layer-2 network launched by a retail brokerage reached about 230,000 daily active addresses in July, overtaking Base on that measure within roughly four weeks of going live. Base answered with volume, processing close to 188 million payment transactions over a comparable period. Arbitrum, meanwhile, retains the deepest pools of capital, and together Base and Arbitrum hold something like 80% of all liquidity across the layer-2 ecosystem.
The brokerage''s advantage is distribution, not technology. Millions of existing customers who never chose a network were handed one, which produces user counts no independent chain can match through incentives.
Each metric flatters a different business. Daily active addresses measure the top of a funnel and are trivially inflated by airdrop farming. Transaction counts measure throughput on chains where a transaction costs a fraction of a cent. Value locked measures what people are willing to risk, which is the hardest of the three to fake and the slowest to move.
The strategic divergence is real underneath the numbers. Base has pushed toward machine-initiated payments between software agents; the brokerage chain is a distribution channel for its own products; Arbitrum is selling itself to developers as general-purpose infrastructure.
Consolidation is the likely end state. Liquidity concentrates, and a network with users but no capital eventually routes its trades somewhere that has both.