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Arbitrum and Optimism Updates: L2s in Action
Sandra Leow
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Key Takeaways
10 min read

  • Both Optimism and Arbitrum have seen growth in daily active addresses, with Optimism experiencing a recent increase of 19%, while Arbitrum has seen a slight decrease of 6.76%. Transactions on Arbitrum peaked during the airdrop season but have since returned to pre-airdrop levels, while Optimism has seen a surge in transaction count since May 2023.

  • Average daily gas fees paid have decreased for both Optimism and Arbitrum since their peak in mid-May, with Optimism now having the lowest fees compared to other L2 and zkEVM scaling solutions.

  • Arbitrum has introduced Arbitrum Orbit, a new development framework for creating Layer-3 solutions that settle on top of Layer-2 chains, offering increased scalability. Optimism completed the BedRock upgrade, reducing transaction fees by up to 50% and paving the way for the Superchain vision, where developers can build applications using the OP Stack.

  • The upcoming Cancun Upgrade and the implementation of EIP-4844 in Ethereum's sharding design are expected to further benefit both Arbitrum and Optimism, leading to lower fees and improved user experience on Layer-2 solutions.

Introduction

General-purpose L2s like Arbitrum and Optimism are gaining popularity over the past few months. Optimism and Arbitrum are currently positioned as the leading general-purpose L2s. Although ZK-Rollups are starting to gain some traction, Optimistic Rollup solutions are still dominating across most key metrics.

Optimistic Rollups remain the most viable and battle-tested scaling solution in the market, with a $5.7b out of $7.41b dominance in total TVL for existing Ethereum Scaling Solutions.

Both Optimism and Arbitrum have gone through major events this year. Arbitrum launched its ARB token and airdropped tokens to its community alongside other notable developments like Arbitrum Orbit and Nova, and Optimism...