Since the beginning of the year, Optimism, one of the layers 2 of Ethereum, has seen its number of unique addresses increase by more than 45%. This is an opportunity to take stock of the adoption of this scaling solution.
Optimism sees increased adoption
Layer 2 is one of the keys to scaling the Ethereum blockchain (ETH). One of them, Optimism (OP), is seeing its adoption grow month after month.
In particular, more than 45% of new addresses have been created since 1 January. Today, the network has almost 3.9 million addresses, and at this rate, the symbolic 4 million mark should be passed within the week:
Figure 1 – Number of unique addresses on Optimism
While there has been a significant increase in terms of percentages, there is still huge room for improvement when compared with other networks. For example, Arbitrum (ARB), the main competitor, has 7.5 million unique addresses. Using layers 1 as another reference, we counted 328 million unique addresses on the BNB Smart Chain last week, while Ethereum has more than 232 million.
Daily transactions have fallen sharply since the height of the OP airdrop campaign, peaking at 800,000. Although they vary greatly from one day to the next, we can consider a range generally within an average of 200,000 to 300,000 in recent months:
Figure 2 – Number of daily trades on Optimism
Speaking of activity, a query from Blockwork Research on Dune compares the two main optimistic rollups. Even after Arbitrum’s airdrop, Optimism is still behind its rival. For example, on 20 May, Arbitrum recorded nearly 160,000 trades, compared with nearly 53,000 for the latter:
Figure 3 – Daily active addresses on Arbitrum and Optimism
Financial data
To complete the analysis of network activity, let’s look at decentralised finance (DeFi) on Optimism. To date, Layer 2 has 136 applications and a total locked value (TVL) of almost $900 million, making it the 6th largest DeFi blockchain.
It will also be interesting to note that this TVL remains relatively close to its all-time high (ATH), reached on 11 August 2022 at $1.146 billion:
Figure 4 – TVL of DeFi protocols on Optimism
Decentralised exchange (DEX) Velodrome accounts for just under 27% of this TVL, or $241.64 million. The top 10 applications include well-known names such as Aave, Uniswap and Curve :
Figure 5 – Top 10 DeFi protocols on Optimism
The OP token is trading at $1.62, down 50% since the ATH at the end of February. This puts the asset in 84th place in the CoinGecko rankings, with a capitalisation of $540 million.
While Optimism’s development, like that of other layer 2s in general, is encouraging, there is still a long way to go before it reaches true maturity. However, the data is promising, and it will be interesting to judge its adoption once we are back in the bull market, and activity within the ecosystem follows the trend.
