Empty mempool.... Starting to feel bad for it!.... Feels like a new kid on the playground without any friends to play with!...
not sure what to make of it.. 40+ millions wallets and only 1000 or so transactions... Is Layer 2 - Lightning Network working?

One thing is for sure... Hash rate will jump 6% higher in 18 hours!
Which is in fact great. Ordinals and other retarded stuff (inscriptions or whatever they're called) are gone finally. It basically means Bitcoin is turning into store of value not some kind of dick pic or fart sound storage. You have to understand one thing: it's not the number of transactions in the mempool that's driving Bitcoin price up.
I've been noticing this. The chain can not be spammed with uneconmical bullshit forever, the high fees will eventually drain all the wealth and the miners will put it to ecconmical use by expanding capex. So this decline was a certaininty just waiting to happen.
I also wonder how much of this drop is also to do with shitcoins falling out of favor. Less Bitcoin being used to buy that shit perhaps, transactions between exchanges? the LN is also probably having an effect, as well as batching transactions, and no doubt a few other things.