Optimism Transactions Outpace Arbitrum, But Why Are More People Using It?

Recently, transactions on Optimism surpassed those on the Arbitrum system, but are the project's foundations strong enough to maintain long-term growth?

Source: validvent.com

Built on top of Ethereum, Optimism functions as a stand-alone blockchain and provides layer-2 scalability. In the growing competitive world of decentralized finance (DeFi), Optimism could still be able to flourish even when its total value locked (TVL) is lower than that of its competitors. Optimism had an advantage at first since it was one of the innovators in the DeFi market, but it faced tough competition. For the previous six months, the project has lagged behind comparable scaling alternatives in terms of daily transactions. But things took a turn for the better in late July, when Optimism finally surpassed its chief rival, Arbitrum, and began to exhibit growing user demand.

Growing Popularity Of Layer-2 Scaling Methods

Based on statistics from L2beat, layer-2 activity on Ethereum has increased significantly, exceeding mainnet activity by a factor of more than four. Ethereum's scaling issues have given rise to a number of alternatives, and each layer-2 project has a distinct focus, covering topics like privacy, particular decentralized apps, and nonfungible token markets.

Arbitrum vs. Optimism, number of unique daily active addresses. Source: GrowThePie

As a result, depending on demand, the scoreboard of operations and volumes is continuously updated, and every solution has pros and downsides of its own. Using rollups, Optimism combines many transactions into a single transaction that is processed at the base layer, assimilating all of Ethereum's security features. The idea underlying optimism is that all transactions are legitimate unless they are contested and shown to be false, which enables users to deal quickly and affordably.

Arbitrum and Optimism both use rollups, but the main distinction between the two is that Arbitrum uses a centralized method in which fraud proofs are submitted by a single entity called a sequencer. Anyone may submit them on optimism. From July 20 to now, Optimism has outperformed its layer-2 competition, with a 47% increase in daily transactions. For the first time in six months, Optimism has surpassed rival Arbitrum in daily transactions because of this increase. In addition, the number of daily active addresses on the Optimism protocol has increased by 27.6% in the last 30 days, compared to a 7.5% decrease in Arbitrum's activity. This pattern suggests a possible change in dominance, although it would be foolish to jump to any conclusions too soon. One of Arbitrum's primary advantages over Optimism is that it has a far greater TVL.

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