Ethereum
The base settlement layer for onchain finance and home of the deepest DeFi liquidity in crypto.
Ethereum is a Proof-of-Stake Layer 1 that serves as the security root for most of DeFi, including the majority of Layer 2 rollups. Its mainnet hosts blue-chip lending markets (Aave, Morpho, Spark, Compound, Fluid) with the deepest stablecoin and ETH liquidity in the industry. Higher gas fees than L2s make it the venue for larger positions where security and depth outweigh transaction cost.
- By far the largest DeFi TVL of any chain — tens of billions across lending, DEXs, and LSTs — with roughly half of all DeFi TVL in April 2026 per DeFiLlama.
- Proof-of-Stake since The Merge (Sept 2022); slot time 12s, epoch finality ~12.8 minutes; no reorgs of finalized blocks under honest-majority assumptions.
- Post-Dencun (EIP-4844, March 2024) blob data has cut L2 fees 80–90% and made Ethereum the cheap-DA layer for the entire rollup ecosystem.
- Home network for GHO, USDS/DAI, USDC, USDT and the deepest LST/LRT liquidity (stETH, weETH, rETH), which anchor most cross-chain lending strategies.
- Fusaka upgrade activated December 3, 2025, expanding blob throughput and enabling chains like Mantle to switch to full ZK-rollup mode.
Frequently asked questions
Why deposit on Ethereum mainnet if L2 fees are so much lower?
Ethereum has the deepest liquidity and the strongest security assumptions. For large positions the gas cost is small relative to the size, and you avoid the additional trust assumptions of an L2 sequencer, bridge, or validium DA. Most institutional lending flows still settle on mainnet for this reason.
How safe is Ethereum for large deposits?
Ethereum's Proof-of-Stake consensus is secured by tens of millions of ETH staked across hundreds of thousands of validators, making it economically infeasible to attack. It has never had a successful consensus fork or double-spend since PoS activated. The main residual risk is smart-contract risk in whichever protocol you deposit into, not the chain itself.
What lending protocols are live on Ethereum?
Essentially all of them — Aave V3 and V4, Morpho Blue and Vaults, Compound V3, Spark, Fluid, Euler V2, Sky, and smaller specialized markets. Ethereum has the widest choice of markets, curators, and collateral types, which is why it produces the most rate discovery across DeFi.