Overview of the Layer 2 market status: Arbitrum occupies more than 50% of the market, ZkSync is ready to go

Arbitrum of Optimistic Rollup occupies a major share of the Layer 2 market. After the ZkSync mainnet is launched, will zkRollup seize more market share? How will the Layer 2 market change?

After you sing, we will appear on the stage. Recently, the Layer 1 project Aptos' mainnet launch has sparked heated discussions. From the launch of TPS being questioned to the airdrop of 20 million APTs on the entire network, Aptos has dominated the discussion hot list in the encryption community. At the same time, the ZkSync2.0 mainnet, the representative project of Layer2, will also be launched on October 28. The potential airdrop opportunity of ZkSync has also aroused the appetite of community users.

At present, Layer 2 mainly has six solutions, namely state channel, side chain, Plasma, Optimistic Rollup, Validium and zkRollup. Among them, Optimistic Rollup occupies the main market of Layer 2, Arbitrum TVL, the representative project of Optimistic Rollup, accounts for 51.6% of the Layer 2 market, and Optimism accounts for 30.56% of the Layer 2 market. ZkSync of zkRollup only accounts for 1.13% of the Layer 2 market, and ZkSync 2.0 is urgently needed to reverse the situation.

This article interprets the current market situation of Layer 2 from the perspective of data, and based on the current market situation, analyzes Rollup's representative projects Arbitrum, Optimism and ZkSync.

Rollup occupies the main market share of Layer2

According to the TVL ratio of Layer 2, Rollup occupies most of the market share. Among them, Arbitrum TVL is US$2.4 billion, accounting for 51.6% of the market share; Optimism TVL is US$1.43 billion, accounting for 30.56% of the market share.

Among the top ten TVL projects, stablecoins and ETH account for the most assets. The largest stablecoin is dYdX, a decentralized derivatives trading platform based on StarkEx, Starkware’s expansion solution, accounting for 100%; the largest ETH is ZkSync, accounting for 55.4%.

From the perspective of Layer 2 on-chain transaction volume, the Arbitrum market ranks first in terms of transaction volume, with approximately $34 million, followed by Optimism with approximately $29 million, followed closely by ZkSync with approximately $12 million in transaction volume. In addition, there is a large difference in the transaction volume of Layer 2 projects, and the market transaction volume difference between the first and tenth projects is nearly 40 times.

In terms of the number of users, Arbitrum still has the largest number of total users and total active users, mainly because the ecology of Arbitrum is very mature at present, and the projects of various tracks have participated in the ecological construction network of Arbitrum. Optimism has the most new users. The possible reason is that since June this year, Optimism has launched airdrops, and new users can also enjoy the corresponding airdrops in the airdrop rules. Since August, ecological projects have also distributed Optimism The airdrop is used for liquidity incentives, which is triggered temporarilyOP Summer, which motivates more new users to participate in Optimism's network.

In terms of transfer and transaction fees, ZkSync is the lowest, at $0.02 and $0.05 respectively, much lower than ETH’s handling fees. Lower transaction fees encourage more projects and users to participate in the ZkSync ecological construction, which is one of the reasons why ZkSync 2.0 has the potential to surpass Arbitrum and Optimism.

Arbitrum, Optimism, ZkSync ecological development comparison

Arbitrum

Arbitrum is derived from Arbitrum One. Arbitrum Nitro is an upgraded version of Arbitrum One L2. Arbitrum's team is the well-known Offchain Labs in the industry. The main difference between Arbitrum and Optimism is that Arbitrum uses multiple rounds of fraud proofs, that is, through binary search, to find the first opcode of the block that caused the divergence, and it only needs to execute this opcode on the chain.

As of October 19, there are 296 Arbitrum ecological projects, involving various tracks such as wallets, NFTs, and bridges. Arbitrum TVL occupies 51.6% of the entire Layer2 network. Judging from the number of transactions and addresses, Arbitrum is still in a stage of rapid growth. The number of Arbitrum addresses has increased nearly five times from nearly 300,000 in January to nearly 1.5 million now. In addition, Arbitrum has not issued coins yet, and its ecological potential projects also deserve our attention.

Optimism

Optimism is a Layer2 network that establishes instant transactions and scalable smart contracts on Ethereum, and creates OVM on Optimism, which is designed to work with Ethereum Layer1. Optimism not only retains the security of the Ethereum mainnet level, but also greatly reduces the gas fee of the network.

Optimsim is currently the fastest-growing network for Rollup users. From January 2022 to the present, the number of addresses has increased by nearly ten times, and the total number of addresses has a tendency to catch up with Arbitrum. Especially since June this year, the total number of Optimism addresses has grown exponentially, and Optimism’s airdrop incentives have promoted the growth of new users to a certain extent.

ZkSync

ZkSync is the first universal ZK rollup compatible with EVM. The upcoming zkEVM will better integrate DeFi and Web3 with zkSync. The ZkSync main network will be launched on October 28. Before that, many projects such as wallets, cross-bridges, NFT markets, games, and DAOs have been launched on the ZkSync test network. After the mainnet goes live, Uniswap, 1inch and Yearn Finance will also be deployed on ZkSync one after another. ZkSync will be a powerful ecosystem that can realize all things on Layer1 more efficiently, and the entire scale may achieve exponential growth.

As of October 19, there are 148 ZkSync ecological projects, TVL is 52 million US dollars, and the number of addresses on the chain is nearly 600,000. The perfect infrastructure and low transaction costs indicate that the zkSync 2.0 ecosystem is ready to welcome large-scale users.

Summarize

From the above analysis, Rollup occupies the main market of Layer 2. From the perspective of TVL, Arbitrum TVL occupies 51.6% of the market share, and Optimism occupies 30.56% of the market share; in terms of user volume, Arbitrum is the network with the most total users, and Optimism is the network with the most new users; in terms of transaction fees From the looks of it, ZkSync has the lowest transfer and transaction fees.

Compared with the current main competitors of Layer 2, ZkSync has no obvious advantages. However, the Layer 2 market is still in its early stage, and the market size and trend may undergo huge changes. In addition, Polygon Hermez has also become a new competitor in the Layer2 market. After the product and technology are fully prepared, the ZkSync main network will also be launched soon. After the ZkSync main network is officially launched, it may usher in a full-scale ecological explosion, and the Layer 2 market will also usher in the era of great navigation.