As smart contracts get more advanced we should expect counteracting effects on the number of transactions per block.

• More complex transactions require more gas; so fewer transactions will fit into the gas limit.
• More experienced developers better optimize transactions, allowing more transactions in the gas limit.

Users pay block creators to have transactions included in blocks.

• Because of the gasLimit, transactions must compete on price & complexity to be included in blocks.
• Transactions participate in an auction of ETH per gas used. Typically the measure is in gwei (gigawei: 1 x 10^-9 ETH).
• When markets are volatile, blockspace costs a premium, including crashes where arbitrage bots take advantage of price differences across both decentralized and centralized exchanges.

Note: Block creators don’t just use highest price/gas to select transactions. There is profit in choosing the order of transactions within a block including inserting new transactions. This is called “MEV”: Maximum Extractable Value.

Ethereum has a large developer community launching 1000s of contracts a day.

• Down noticeably from 100,000+/day in the “DeFi Summer” of 2020.
• Could be related to gas costs & demand for blockspace since 2020.
• Could also be related to improved developer tooling, e.g., better mainnet forks and test networks which reduce the need to “test in production”.

These contracts include tokens, liquidity pools, Safes, and protocols.

Unique Externally Owned Accounts (i.e., individual private keys) to do 1 or more transactions in the last 24 hours.

User transactions include a "Nonce" (Number used Once) with indicates what # Tx this is for that user. A nonce of 500 means that was the User's 500th transaction. Lower Median Nonce means more new users.