Ethereum recorded 989,500 daily active addresses over the past 24 hours, its highest level since March, according to Santiment, signaling a renewed increase in on-chain usage on the second-largest blockchain by market capitalization. The metric tracks unique addresses that successfully participated in a transaction in a day and is widely used to gauge network engagement. Higher activity can reflect increased decentralized finance usage, NFT trading and general transfers, although active addresses alone do not fully capture network health because transaction volume and value also matter. The last time Ethereum reached a similar level was during March's broader market rally. Since then, the network has completed the Shapella upgrade, which enabled staked ETH withdrawals, while layer-2 networks such as Arbitrum and Optimism have continued to expand. Recent interest in liquid staking derivatives, restaking protocols, NFTs and decentralized exchanges may also be contributing to the increase, underscoring Ethereum's continued central role in decentralized applications despite competition from other smart contract platforms.