Optimism, the Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution, has achieved a remarkable surge in daily transactions, reaching an impressive 944,668 on Thursday, surpassing Arbitrum’s 660,000 transactions.
Source: Optimism
This milestone marks the end of Arbitrum’s six-month dominance as the layer-2 platform with the highest daily transactions.
Optimism’s remarkable feat is largely attributed to the popularity and activity surrounding Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency founded by the CEO of ChatGPT Sam Altman.
Worldcoin is currently based on the Optimism Network and aims to authenticate humans online through its main feature, World ID. It has garnered widespread attention and adoption, reaching more than two million users from its beta period. The team is nursing further expansion plans which will enable people in 35 cities across 20 countries to sign up to Worldcoin and scan their iris in exchange for WLD, the ecosystem’s native asset.
Data from Dune Analytics suggest that transaction count on Optimism could spike further, as there are pre-launch wallets that are yet to migrate to Optimism.
Arbitrum still leads the pack
Despite the recent success, Optimism and other layer-2 networks still trail Arbitrum in terms of total value locked and active wallet addresses. Arbitrum had surpassed five million accounts after the Shapella upgrade in April. It accounts for about 57.86% of the L2 market share with $5.98billion locked in smart contracts while Optimism constitutes 27.3% with $2.83bn in total value locked (TVL).
Both Optimism and Arbitrum were heavily backed by VCs and are Optimistic rollups designed to scale the Ethereum network. The concept behind Optimistic Rollups is to “roll up” or aggregate multiple transactions into a single data structure, known as a batch, and then submit that batch to the Ethereum main chain.
Instead of executing each transaction on the main chain, which could be slow and expensive, the rollup processes these transactions off-chain in a trustless manner. Once verified, the batch is posted on the Ethereum main chain, and its validity is ensured by a set of validators.
Another type of scaling solution, ZK-rollup is being championed by zkSync who have received almost half a billion dollars in funding.
