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Arbitrum Season: Real-Yield and DEX Wars
Sandra Leow
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Key Takeaways
13 min read
  • Arbitrum's ecosystem is at an inflection point, with Optimistic Rollups as the dominant L2 rollup solution. It recently achieved 1.09m daily transactions, surpassing Ethereum briefly.
  • GMX, Gains Network, and Radiant Capital are some of the most prominent protocols within the Arbitrum ecosystem that promote the real-yield narrative. These protocols have innovated their token economic design to generate value back to their token holders, differentiating them from DeFi protocols on Ethereum.
  • Uniswap and SushiSwap lead the decentralized exchange (DEX) competition on Arbitrum, followed by Camelot and ZyberSwap, while Trader Joe has recently expanded to Arbitrum.

Introduction

Arbitrum recently hit an ATH of 1.09m transactions per day (as of 27 February 2023), briefly surpassing Ethereum. In comparison, Ethereum is averaging between 1.1m transactions per day. As seen in the chart, daily transactions on Ethereum appear to be stagnant, while Arbitrum is consistently reaching new highs.

Real-Yield Protocols

Real yield refers to the distribution of yield to liquidity providers and token holders as an incentive to promote the growth of a protocol. However, to distribute such yields, the protocol must have a product that generates substantial revenue.

DeFi Summer in 2020 has demonstrated that without a good revenue-sharing model, token holders have no incentive to keep their...