The Ethereum network is processing more transactions than ever before, but market sentiment remains relatively cool, with prediction market traders showing more optimism for gold than for the second-largest cryptocurrency.

The 7-day moving average of daily transaction count for Ethereum hit a new all-time high of 2.023 million on January 4, per data from CryptoQuant, indicating an uptick in users interacting with the blockchain.

The surge is primarily driven by “accelerating adoption of real-world asset tokenization, alongside a broader market recovery that has lifted token transfer activity across the network,” Ryan Lee, chief research analyst at Bitget, told Decrypt.

Ethereum is one of the leading platforms for RWA adoption, reinforcing the network’s role as core financial infrastructure rather than a purely speculative platform.

Despite the network activity’s push to record highs, Ethereum’s price action has lagged, with ETH currently trading at $3,240, up 2.2% over the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko data, and 8.9% over the past seven days.

This disconnect reflects the reality that short-term Ethereum pricing remains more sensitive to liquidity conditions and market psychology than on-chain usage alone, according to Lee.

Recent data underscore this sentiment gap, with traders in prediction markets showing more optimism for gold than for the second-largest cryptocurrency.

With gold currently trading at around $4,460, users on prediction market Myriad—owned by Decrypt’s parent company, Dastan—assign a greater chance to gold reaching $5,000 than Ethereum in the near term.

However, investors seem much more confident in a short-term target of $4,000 for ETH, putting a 58% chance on Ethereum rallying to $4,000 rather than falling to $2,500, a figure that has risen from 43% at the start of the year.

Lee framed the prediction data favoring gold as a short-term response to geopolitical and macroeconomic uncertainty, not a structural abandonment of crypto’s “digital gold” narrative.

Ethereum’s long-term investment case remains anchored in its dominance across DeFi and tokenized assets, areas where gold has no functional equivalent, he noted.

The key catalyst to realign price with fundamentals, Lee suggested, is a sustained rise in on-chain ETH accumulation by long-term holders. He argued that as more ETH is absorbed for use within RWAs and DeFi, effective supply tightens, supporting more durable price appreciation and reinforcing Ethereum’s central role in digital asset innovation.