Original Author: Eric, Foresight News
Recently, Solana made a joke at Starknet's expense, mocking how an L2 with only 8 daily active users and 10 daily transactions could still have a $15 billion FDV.
In hindsight, this salt-in-the-wound joke was likely meant to grab attention and segue into the news of Starknet's token STRK launching on Solana via NEAR Intents. However, Solana's jab wasn't baseless. The L2 landscape, which has exploded over the past two years, is indeed facing a traffic crisis.
A recent, compelling example is Zero Network, an L2 incubated by Web3 wallet company Zerion. It was revealed on January 8th that Zero Network had stopped producing blocks for over three weeks, seemingly without any noticeable impact. The official response was even more telling: block production halted on December 19, 2025, but the team only acknowledged plans to fix the issue on December 23rd. The last original post on Zero Network's official Twitter account was back in May of the same year.
That said, the claim of only 8 users and 10 transactions per day is an exaggeration. According to L2BEAT data, Starknet's TPS yesterday was 2.64, translating to over 200,000 transactions on the network in a day. However, this number is still shockingly low. Even the Ethereum mainnet handles about 10 times that volume daily.
Data shows that among general-purpose L2s, aside from Base and Polygon, even Arbitrum and OP Mainnet don't significantly outperform Ethereum in TPS. Linea and Starknet have a TPS below 3. Networks not shown in the screenshot include Scroll with a TPS just over 1, and ZKsync, Blast, and others with a TPS below 1.
Looking at TVL data from DefiLlama, Base and Arbitrum together account for nearly 80% of all L2 TVL. The combined conservative valuation of the remaining L2s (excluding the "Others" category) during their private funding rounds is close to $10 billion, yet their combined TVL is less than $2 billion.
In terms of protocol revenue, only the top 7 protocols generated more than $1,000 in the past 24 hours. Daily revenue in the triple or even double digits for many protocols might be less than the interest some large holders earn daily from parking funds on exchanges.
These figures starkly illustrate the current predicament of L2s: Against a backdrop of scarce compelling application narratives, hoping for a killer app that willingly operates on a general-purpose L2 instead of its own appchain has become a pipe dream. Faced with finding a use case that provides stable transaction volume, L2s have converged on the same answer: crypto cards.
Pavel Paramonov, founder of crypto research firm Hazeflow, has criticized crypto cards, arguing they aren't truly "crypto payments" but rather fiat payments, failing to genuinely promote cryptocurrency adoption. However, he also noted that many projects or chains launch crypto cards out of necessity, primarily to retain users within their ecosystem.
Many crypto cards launched by exchanges today are "custodial" cards. User assets are held in exchange or institutional custodial accounts, and settlements during spending are handled by the exchange, off-ramp providers, and the card issuer. Settlement for such cards often occurs on Tron, Solana, or even the slightly more expensive Ethereum. This is partly due to the large supply of stablecoin assets on these chains, and partly because some cards reduce costs through batch settlements rather than per-transaction settlements. For institutions, liquidity and stability might be more critical than an L2's low cost.
The type of crypto card that L2s are eyeing is the various forms of "non-custodial" cards. Before using such a card, assets reside in the user's own wallet, and each payment is settled individually, effectively increasing on-chain activity. Typical examples include Scroll (settlement layer for Etherfi card), Gnosis, and Linea (settlement layer for MetaMask card).
In September 2024, Etherfi announced its payment card would use Scroll as the settlement layer. Scroll enables "gasless transactions" for Etherfi and offers higher cashback rates subsidized by the SCR token. Beyond the traditional method of directly spending assets on Scroll, the Etherfi card features a unique mechanism: users can borrow fiat currency for payments using yield-bearing assets on Scroll as collateral, supported assets include eETH, weETH, wETH, eBTC, etc.
Gnosis, a sidechain with long-term low visibility, has made a notable comeback in the payment card space. Its card, Gnosis Pay, primarily operates in Europe. Users can connect non-custodial wallets like MetaMask or Gnosis Safe within the Gnosis Pay App. During spending, Gnosis Pay converts supported assets from the user's wallet (certain Euro, GBP, and USD stablecoins) into the Euro stablecoin EURe issued by Monerium, which is then converted 1:1 to Euros for payment.
The crypto card issued by MetaMask uses ConsenSys's L2, Linea, as its primary settlement network, with additional support for Solana and Base. Before spending, users need to deposit supported payment assets (various USD or Euro stablecoins) into their MetaMask wallet. During payment, user assets are transferred to an off-ramp service provider, converted to fiat, and then paid to the merchant.
Due to the per-transaction settlement nature of non-custodial cards, each user purchase triggers a smart contract to verify the remaining asset balance and execute the on-chain asset transfer. This allows L2s to rely on payments—an absolutely high-frequency and sustainable scenario—to ensure a certain level of on-chain activity. According to Paymentscan data, Scroll, through its partnership with Etherfi and SCR subsidies, has captured a significant market share in card payments. However, this data isn't entirely accurate, as many card payments might not involve on-chain transfers but rather internal institutional settlements. Regardless, it's an undeniable fact that L2s have found a practical use case in payments.
It's not just emerging L2s feeling the pressure. Polygon, which isn't strictly an L2, also shifted its strategic focus to payments recently. By the end of 2025, non-USD stablecoin transfer volume on Polygon exceeded $11.1 billion, with the new stablecoin XSGD seeing $2.24 billion in volume and the Australian dollar stablecoin AUDF reaching $2.46 billion. Furthermore, Polygon has become one of the primary chains for Stripe's stablecoin payments. Its announcement on January 13th to acquire crypto payment infrastructure Coinme and blockchain development platform Sequence for $250 million clearly signaled an "all-in on payments" strategy.
After weathering a bombardment of various concepts, L2s have come to terms with reality. While they still hope for novel applications, the immediate priority is to survive by leveraging their low-cost, high-efficiency characteristics through payments.