Arbitrum Drops Ethereum to Three-Year Lows and Breaks All-Time High

Layer 2 protocols, in particular Arbitrum and Optimism, account for more and more activity on Ethereum. The growth in the share of daily transactions for these protocols is so strong that Ethereum itself has fallen to its lowest level in two and a half years. In aggregate, these roll-ups account for almost as many transactions as their basis.

Daily transactions on Ethereum mainnet, Optimism, and Arbitrum since the start of 2020.

Ethereum mainnet transactions are at their lowest point in 2.5 years, but Layer 2 rollups now process as many transactions as mainnet. pic.twitter.com/3BilZvRUOh

— Patrick | Dynamo DeFi (@Dynamo_Patrick) December 26, 2022

At the same time, the number of unique addresses on Arbitrum updates daily the record of unique addresses on its network. At the moment, this number stands at 2.34 million addresses. The trend for daily transactions is down so far, with a drop of 55% from its peak of 573,613 transactions on Nov. 9. The total number of transactions on Arbitrum for all time is 86.27 million.

Despite such outstanding performance, Optimism right now is ahead of Arbitrum in terms of the number of daily transactions, having almost twice as many, and therefore earning correspondingly higher revenues.

Who’s got more?

At the same time, according to DefiLlama, it is Arbitrum that has a higher total value locked. Right now, its TVL value is $1.06 billion, $400 million more than Optimism (OP). This value also puts Arbitrum higher than Polygon, another Ethereum Layer 2 roll-up, whose token, by the way, is now the 10th largest crypto asset by capitalization.