The most awkward thing about Layer 2s right now isn’t that nobody uses them—it’s that most people who do are farming airdrops. The numbers might look lively: during an incentive campaign, a leading L2 can see daily active addresses climb into the hundreds of thousands, transaction counts double in the short term, and cross-chain bridge volume rise noticeably. But once the campaign ends, daily active addresses often fall back to 30% to 50% of their pre-campaign levels, and a sizable portion of new addresses disappear after completing a few interactions. On-chain activity shows its true colors as soon as incentives dry up, and only a handful of users are actually running applications.

The problem lies in the user mix. Many addresses belong to “task-driven users”: bridge once, make a few swaps, mint an NFT, borrow and repay once, then wait for the snapshot. Scripted interactions and people lying in wait with multiple accounts are also common. For these users, an L2 is just a low-cost tool for farming interactions, not a destination for long-term product use. So we see a disconnect: gas fees have dropped from several dollars on mainnet to just a few cents, making transaction costs almost no longer a barrier, but applications that genuinely need frequent interactions—payments, social, games, and long-tail DeFi—haven’t taken off as a result. Users bridge over, complete the tasks, and leave; retention and repeat usage never take hold.

Scaling solves the problems of being “expensive” and “slow,” but it doesn’t answer “Why should I come here?” Low gas fees reduce friction; they don’t create demand automatically. If a product doesn’t offer a unique use case, sustainable returns, social connections, or a developer ecosystem, users have no reason to stay on a particular L2. Incentives can buy short-term metrics, but they can’t buy genuine usage. So here’s my take: the next step for L2s can’t be just competing over TPS and fees. They need to answer why applications have to run here and why users would want to keep coming back. Otherwise, once airdrop season ends, on-chain activity will go quiet again. What do you think?