A combination of protocol level upgrades, stablecoin activity, and shifts in cryptocurrency sentiment have pushed Ether wallet creation to an all-time high.
Analysts at Santiment said in an X post on Tuesday that an average of 327,000 new wallets were created per day last week, with Sunday hitting a record high of more than 393,000 in a single day.
New wallets could indicate new users, developers, or institutions entering the ecosystem.
Also, according to the data, the number of non-empty Ether wallets now stands at 172.9 million, which is also an all-time high.
ether (Ethereum) is currently $3,330, up 7.5% in the past 24 hours after hovering between $3,068 and $3,292 last week, according to CoinGecko.
An average of 327,000 new Ethereum wallets were created every day over the past week. sauce: Saintly
Analysts at Santiment suggest that the proliferation of new wallets may be due in part to Fusaka’s upgrade in December, which “made it cheaper and easier to use Ethereum” by improving on-chain data processing and reducing the cost of sending information back to Ethereum from the L2 network.
“This has reduced fees, made interactions with apps and rollups smoother, and encouraged many new users to open their wallets and start using the network,” they said.
Changes in Cryptocurrency Sentiment and Stablecoins
In addition to major protocol upgrades, Ethereum could also benefit from an improvement in general sentiment as investors and developers reset their strategies in the new year.
Santiment analysts said holder sentiment changed from negative to neutral to positive in mid-December, which “often coincides with more retail users signing up and creating addresses.”
Towards the end of the year, we also saw an increase in interest from new users joining the ecosystem to explore DeFi, non-fungible tokens, and other apps.
A surge in stablecoin transfers on Ethereum in late 2025 may also have been a factor, Santiment said, indicating that “the network was being actively used for payments and settlements.”
“This type of real financial activity tends to involve new participants who create wallets to send, receive, or hold stablecoins and other tokens.”
More than half of all Ether is staked
According to on-chain analytics platform Nansen, more than half of the total supply of Ether comes from staking contracts. The ETH2 Beacon deposit contract holds over 77 million tokens, which corresponds to the total validator staking deposits used to secure the network.
Cryptocurrency exchange Binance holds nearly 4 million ether in wallets on behalf of its users, while peer exchange Coinbase holds around 2.3 million ether.
