ETHEREUM NETWORK USAGE HITS RECORD HIGH

Summary from the TLDR Crypto newsletter

Ethereum's 7-day average of daily transactions reached a record 2.023 million on January 4, driven primarily by accelerating real-world asset tokenization adoption, yet prediction market data reveal traders assign higher odds to gold hitting $5,000 than Ethereum reaching $4,000. Despite the network usage milestone, ETH is trading at $3,240, with analysts attributing the sentiment disconnect to short-term macro uncertainty and liquidity conditions outweighing on-chain fundamentals in price discovery. Analysts argue this represents a temporary divergence, noting that Ethereum's long-term investment case remains anchored in its DeFi and tokenized asset dominance and suggests that increasing ETH absorption into RWAs and DeFi protocols will tighten effective supply and support more durable price appreciation. Prediction markets show 58% odds for ETH hitting $4,000 versus falling to $2,500, up from 43% at the start of the year, indicating some improving sentiment despite the current lag behind gold.