How to read the city
Ethereum City turns the numbers of the Ethereum ecosystem into a cityscape. Once you know the points below, you can read where it is busy and what is moving without a table or a chart.
1. The map: downtown and four directions
Downtown in the middle is Ethereum mainnet (L1). To the west are the Superchain districts built with the OP Stack, to the east the Arbitrum family, to the north the ZK rollups. Across the river to the south are sidechains with their own validators, joined to downtown only by bridges.
So the direction a district lies in already tells you which family of technology it belongs to.
2. Building height and district size
Building height is the market cap of the chain’s token. Chains without a token, such as Base, use deposited assets (TVL) instead and are drawn as wide civic blocks.
The wider and denser a district, the more assets (TVL) are deposited there; empty blocks stay parks and car parks. At night, busier districts have more lit windows.
3. Vehicles on the road
Vehicles on district roads are transactions per second (TPS): bikes and scooters below 1, cars and taxis from 1 to 15, buses from 15 to 60, and convoys of heavy trucks above that.
More and bigger vehicles mean the chain is being used more right now.
4. Containers going downtown, buses coming out
L2s bundle transactions and post the data to L1. Those bundles are called blobs; in the city they are container trucks driving from a district to the blob depot downtown.
Buses leaving downtown for a district are bridge deposits, assets moving from L1 to an L2.
5. The lighthouse and the ring road
The lighthouse downtown is the beacon chain, which runs Ethereum’s consensus. It flashes every 12 seconds when a new block is produced.
The colour of the downtown ring road is the current L1 gas price: green is quiet, red is busy.
6. Weather and traffic are different things
Weather is the price trend. The sky is ETH’s change, and the clouds, rain and rainbows over a district are the market-cap-weighted change of that district’s tokens (🌈 surge · ☀️ up · ⛅ flat · 🌧 down · ⛈ plunge).
Traffic is how busy a district is compared with its own usual throughput and fees (🟢 clear · 🟡 normal · 🟠 busy · 🔴 jammed).
Weather only shows what prices already did. It is not a forecast.
7. Shops and pedestrians
The shops under the buildings are tokens issued on or bridged to that chain. The sign carries the token’s name; its colour is the category (🏦 stablecoin · ⛽ gas token · ⚡ staking · 🏛 governance · 🛒 DeFi · 🎪 meme · 🏢 real-world assets · 🛂 wrapped assets) and its width is market cap.
Pedestrians are token transfers. When one walks into a shop, that token has just moved.
8. Whales, fireworks and billboards
When a large amount of a token moves, a gold cash van leaves the shop; for very large amounts a helicopter takes off. Fireworks go up over a shop when its token surges.
The billboards on the ETH tower and at district entrances rotate through prices, gas, district weather and whale moves.
9. Citizens, houses and the forecast game
Visitors can become citizens of a district. A citizen gets a house in the residential blocks and can write in the district guestbook.
In the forecast game you pick a district and call the next day’s weather (the direction of prices). Correct calls raise your rank and enlarge your house. There are only points — no prizes and no cash value.
Citizens also receive a few bricks (🧱) every day. Bricks repaint your house’s roof and walls, add an ornament, or put a short message on the city’s billboards (only messages the operator has checked go up, for 24 hours). Bricks cannot be bought or sold and are separate from forecast-game points.
10. Clicking and moving around
Click a car, truck, bus, pedestrian or house and a speech bubble tells you what it stands for and what value it carries right now.
On a computer, drag to move, drag with the right button (or Shift) to rotate, and use the wheel to zoom. On a phone, move with one finger, pinch to zoom and twist to rotate. The ? button at the bottom right shows the same help.
11. Where the numbers come from
Blocks, gas, blobs and deposits are read by your browser straight from each chain’s public RPC. Market caps and prices come from CoinGecko, TVL and forecast settlement prices from DefiLlama, and rollup stages follow L2BEAT.
If a public server is briefly unavailable, that chain is marked as simulated and drawn from its averages.