🔍 Ethereum ends 2025 with a new record

PLUS: Ethereum sets records, IPOs replace tokens, EU taxes crypto and Bitcoin becomes music

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Cryptopolitan News
December 25, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

The market is quiet and prices are down. But under the radar, Ethereum has just processed more transactions in one day than it has all year.

According to Etherscan, Ethereum L1 processed 1.91 million transactions on a single day, a record high for 2025 at an average fee of just $0.16. The interesting thing is that there was no major token launch or no meme mania, which are usually the reasons for such a spike.

So, what’s driving this?

This isn’t a fluke. It follows two major upgrades that finally did what they were supposed to do.

  • Pectra (May) doubled the data space on Layer 2s use to settle with Ethereum. That would result in lower rollup costs, and smoother integration for networks such as Base, Arbitrum and Optimism.

  • Fusaka (December) went further. It boosted block size by ~33% and added PeerDAS, a mechanism that allows validators to stamp their seal of approval on giant chunks of data by examining just a smaller part.

Why it matters

The network recently reached a record for throughput without the drama or congestion and in a relatively quite market. That’s rare in the crypto space. Generally, spikes in usage are chased by price rallies. Here, we’re seeing the exception.

It’s a sign that Ethereum is moving from a hype-driven app chain to the foundation for broader financial infrastructure.

Which means more transactions, lower fees and no bottlenecks. And none of it with retail mania influencing the stats.

But there are still cracks

The record doesn’t indicate that Ethereum is entirely solved.

The ecosystem remains fragmented. Users are still forced to master bridges, multiple L2s and complicated wallets. Meanwhile, Ethereum’s global “state”: the complete record of accounts and contracts, continues to bloat. If it gets too large, nobody except those with enterprise-grade hardware will be able to run a node. That’s a decentralization risk.

 đŸ§  Quick explainer: What is “State” in Ethereum?

You can think of Ethereum’s state like a giant ledger: a global, collectively-booked database that has information on every account, every balance, every smart contract and any other bit of data these contracts store.

That state is accretive over time, particularly as more apps, tokens and rollups interact with the chain. Every time that you deploy a new contract, or use a new wallet, that information is added into the state.

The problem?

If the state gets too large in the scale of terabytes, or even petabytes, it’s not affordable for any regular users to run full nodes. That puts the decentralization of Ethereum at risk, because only a handful of entities will be able to afford to verify and secure the network.

It’s one of the largest long-term challenges that Ethereum really needs to figure out if it wants to scale without sacrificing trust.

🧠 Cryptopolitan’s take

For builders and long-term allocators, Ethereum’s story isn’t one of hype. It’s about what you do when nobody is watching. And in markets like these, that kind of signal matters more than ever.

POLL: Ethereum just hit its highest transaction day of 2025. Do you think L1 scalability upgrades will be the key to mainstream adoption?

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📊 Market Watch

Confidence down, claims up

U.S. jobless claims dipped to 214,000, beating forecasts, but consumer confidence has a gloomier tale to tell. The Conference Board Index declined for a fifth consecutive month to 89.1, the lowest since April.

A greater share of Americans said jobs are hard to find, and plans for major purchases are starting to slip. The tension between the hard data on job growth and the soft sentiment is emerging as a theme of 2025.

EU’s Crypto tax net tightens

From 1 January 2026, an EU regulation called DAC8 applies crypto for tax scrutiny.

Platforms such as exchanges and brokers will have to collect and report user data and disseminate it across tax authorities in the EU. Failure to do so could result in frozen wallets, asset seizures and heavy fines. It’s the largest tax enforcement move Europe has made on crypto.

Tokens out, IPOs in

Organizations such as Circle ($18B IPO), Figure Technologies ($5.3B), and CoreWeave ($23B) headlined crypto-native IPOs in a move away from token based fundraising.

Trust was lost in token sales, but investors understood the IPO process and investors value transparency and stock market liquidity.

Exchanges like eToro and Gemini stumbled in their post-IPO life, but the 2026 IPO pipeline is already heating up. Traditional exchanges and compliant platforms are next as crypto’s finance stack grows up further.

🚨 Signal vs Noise

A fake press release announced on Christmas Eve that Circle had launched a gold and silver token trading platform and apparently fooled some of the crypto community.

It used:

  • Fake quotes from CEO Jeremy Allaire

  • Official Circle branding

  • A scamming site that asks you to connect your wallet (a big, big no)

The phantom tokens GLDC, SILC and CIRM never existed and were tied to the COMEX in the announcement for credibility.

Circle has verified that the whole platform is a scam.

PR wires such as Chainwire pulled the story following a compliance review.

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 đŸĽ Top tweets

🎻 Culture Watch

Brazil just approved a concert that turns Bitcoin price data into live orchestral music.

🎼 Backed by the government’s Rouanet Law, the project raised ~$197,000 from donors and private firms. It will use an algorithm to convert BTC’s real-time price shifts into melody, rhythm, and harmony performed live in Brasília.

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