Layer 2 marketing is the work of persuading users, developers and capital to choose one Ethereum layer 2 over the dozens of others, and in 2026 it looks very different from the airdrop races of 2023 and 2024. A layer 2 is a separate network that processes transactions cheaply and posts the results back to Ethereum. There are now so many of them, running such similar technology, that the main differences are who brings the users and what each chain is for.

At AnkhLabs we work with infrastructure teams as well as apps, and the pattern in this market is consistent. The chains that grew this year did it through a partner with customers, a clear purpose or both. This article looks at who leads, why, what incentives have achieved and what an L2 or an app choosing one should do about it.

How many Ethereum layer 2s are there, and how big are they?

The standard reference is the research site L2BEAT, whose address now redirects to ETHBEAT. As of 6 November 2026 it tracked 85 active layer 2 projects with about $37.5 billion in total value secured, which counts every token held on those chains, not only deposits in DeFi apps. That total was about $43.5 billion a month earlier, a drop that mostly reflects a falling ether price, which ETHBEAT put at about $2,240.

ETHBEAT also rates each rollup by "stage", a three-step scale of how far it has moved away from relying on its operators. Stage 0 means the team can still change or stop the chain with few limits, and Stage 2 means users are protected by code alone. Of the 85 layer 2s, 4 were Stage 2, 6 were Stage 1 and 58 were Stage 0, with the rest outside the framework. Most of the market is still trusting the people who run it.

Which layer 2s lead in 2026?

The value is concentrated in a few networks. This table combines ETHBEAT's value and stage data with daily active addresses from growthepie.

Sources: ETHBEAT, growthepie. Figures as of 6 November 2026. Daily active addresses are the latest daily values shown by growthepie and count addresses, not people.

Two things stand out. Base and Arbitrum together hold about $23.6 billion, roughly 63% of all layer 2 value. And the newest entrant on the list, Robinhood Chain, has more daily active addresses than Arbitrum after four months. It went live on 1 July 2026 as a dedicated chain built with the Arbitrum Platform, aimed at tokenized stocks and other financial products. Robinhood did not have to win users from other L2s. It brought its own.

The token prices of the older independent networks tell the other half of the story. As of 6 November 2026, CoinGecko showed ARB about 93% below its January 2024 high and OP about 98% below its March 2024 high. A network token that was meant to align a community has become, for many holders, a reminder of losses.

What changed for layer 2s in 2026?

The first shift was intellectual. In February Vitalik Buterin wrote that the original plan for Ethereum to scale mainly through rollups "no longer makes sense", CoinDesk reported on 3 February. His reasons were that L2s had moved toward decentralisation more slowly than expected and that Ethereum itself was now scaling, with low fees and gas limits set to rise. A fast chain linked to Ethereum through a multisig bridge, he wrote, means "you are not scaling Ethereum". He urged L2s to offer something beyond cheap block space, such as privacy, speed or an app-specific design, and to be clear about the guarantees they give users.

The second shift was commercial. On 18 February Base said it would stop using Optimism's OP Stack and move to its own code, ending a deal under which it shared 15% of its revenue with the Optimism Collective, DL News reported. Base had contributed 8,387 ETH, about 41% of the Collective's lifetime revenue and 90% of it in January. OP lost about a quarter of its value within a day. "This is a hit to near-term onchain revenues," the OP Labs chief executive Jing Wang wrote on X. The Superchain, Optimism's family of chains sharing one stack, had been marketed on network effects, and its largest member walked.

The third shift was the arrival of companies with customers. Robinhood Chain is the clearest case. For an L2 without a parent company, the question is no longer how to win users from rivals but how to compete with chains that start with millions of accounts.

Do incentives still work for layer 2s?

They work in a narrow way. The best documented 2026 example is Arbitrum's DRIP programme, an 80 million ARB budget over four seasons funded by the Arbitrum DAO. Its first season ran from 3 September 2025 to 17 February 2026 and targeted lending and borrowing of yield-bearing ETH and stablecoins on six lending apps, according to a review by Castle Labs, which was sponsored by the DAO but says it kept editorial independence.

The results were mixed in an instructive way. About 16.7 million ARB, around $4.3 million, was paid out. Arbitrum's DeFi value still fell 34% over the season, against 17.6% for Base, which ran no comparable programme, while ether fell about 60% from its August peak. Yet the ETH supply on Arbitrum grew 18% against 9% on Base, and yield-bearing stablecoins in the targeted markets grew sharply. Only three of the six lending apps produced positive cost-effectiveness, and the smallest recipient by rewards was among the best performers. Castle Labs credits the programme's active adjustments, including pausing rewards that were not working.

The marketing lesson is the one we drew in our article on liquidity mining. Paying for deposits can defend a specific market for a while. It cannot make a network the default choice, and the money tends to leave when the payments stop.

What does good layer 2 marketing look like in 2026?

Most L2s will not get a Coinbase or a Robinhood. The ones that do well without one usually make these choices.

• Pick one job and say it in one sentence. Buterin's advice and the market agree. A chain for perpetual futures, for payments, for a game or for private transactions is easy to explain and easy to choose. "Fast, cheap and EVM compatible" describes almost all of them.

• Find a partner with customers before a grant budget. An exchange, a wallet, a fintech or a consumer brand that will route its users to you is worth more than a large fund for builders who then have to find users anyway.

• Be honest about guarantees. Say what stage you are and what you are doing about it. Stage ratings are public, and a vague answer costs trust with institutions and careful users.

• Market to developers as customers. Documentation, working examples and fast support move developers more than hackathon prizes. Our guide to web3 developer marketing covers the playbook.

• Run incentives like a trading desk. Set a target per market, review it every two weeks and cut what does not work, as DRIP did. Points with no clear rules attract farmers, as our piece on crypto points programs explains.

• Report users, not value secured. Value secured moves with the price of ether. Active addresses, retained developers and fee revenue show whether the chain is working.

For apps choosing where to launch, the same logic runs in reverse. Pick the L2 whose users look like yours, not the one with the largest grant. We compared the main options in our guide to the best blockchain to build on.

What we'd tell a founder running a layer 2

First, build an audience before you need one. Infrastructure is hard to explain, and the teams that win attention start talking in public long before mainnet. For Rayls, a blockchain infrastructure project, our work produced 20K+ followers acquired and 500K+ campaign reach. More examples are in our case studies.

Second, back a community, not just a codebase. Our ongoing campaign for Degen, the Farcaster-native token and Degen Chain ecosystem, has generated 2.5m+ campaign impressions to date by working inside a culture that already existed. Chains with a culture keep users when the incentives end.

Third, write the positioning before the token plan. If you cannot say what your chain is for in a sentence a trader or a developer would repeat, no grant budget will fix it. Our go-to-market strategy work starts there.

If you are launching or repositioning a layer 2 and want a second opinion on the plan, talk to AnkhLabs.

The bottom line

The layer 2 market in 2026 has settled into a few large networks with built-in distribution and a long tail of chains looking for a reason to exist. Technology is close to a commodity, and Ethereum's own scaling has removed the argument that every L2 helps Ethereum. What still works is a clear purpose, a partner with users, honest security claims and incentives run with discipline. Layer 2 marketing is now mostly the work of choosing those things early.

This article is for information only and is not investment advice. Figures are as of 6 November 2026 unless stated.