Three protocols compete for dominance of the Ethereum Layer 2-market and its $ 52 billion in so-called Decentralized Finance (Defi): Arbitrum (ARB), Optimism (OP) and Base.
Bullish investors even see a chance for Layer 2S to move some of the $ 220 billion market capitalization of Ethereum or even the values of alternative block chains such as Solana or Avalanche.
Something of a wrong name, a “layer 2” makes and speeds up the transactions of a layer of 1 blockchain, but layer 2s are essentially a block chains that publish data on a basic blockchain.
Arbitrum And Optimism Were the two earliest major competitors and their ratings continue to match. Despite wild different approaches, both ARB and on within 5% of a completely diluted appreciation of $ 3.2 billion.
In contrast to arbitrum and optimism, Base is a business layer 2 that has no native token. Instead of an initial currency offer (ICO) or AirDrop, Base financially rewarded his company founder Coinbase with savings on transaction costs.
Base also used his social media to promote a variety of offshoot projects that have published tokens themselves, such as Zora (Zora) and Base ReSvoreveryleyone.
Optimism
The growth strategy of optimism is based on various business partner boards, even licenses and white that can label his technology for partners such as base.
Although many of the similarities of the optimism have income establishment to benefit token holders, they contain various contractual provisions that can make the planning for the long -term value of on difficult.
A main investigator at Delphi Digital described the main chain of Optimism as ‘Trending to Ghost Town’. To prevent the decline, optimism says it is Working on Superchain -Interoperability for Apps.
It has large partnerships, including Uniswap, Curve Finance and Aave.
Despite the basis of the technology of optimism, it is now a direct competitor who rewards Coinbase much more than on -token holders.
Arbitrum
In contrast to optimism, Arbitrum has retained the majority of its liquidity on its most important blockchain. In contrast to the flashy business partnerships of optimism and off-chain transactions, almost all income on Arbitrum can be directly attributed to ARB-token holders.
Because arbitrum holds its liquidity on the chain instead of off-chain partnerships, it is easier for Defi trackers to estimate the total value (TVL). Most estimates place the amount of crypto assets on the blockchain of arbitrum at $ 2.3 billion.
Arbitrum’s bridged TVL, which includes double counting of various crypto assets over block chains, is more than $ 11 billion.
To continue to grow, Arbitrum has also encouraged a job of extra chains that exploit their own transaction levels. These job chains hold some assets as liquidity from the main chain of Arbitrum.
Read more: Coinbase claims that the just launched token base is actually no token at all
Base
The basis supported by Coinbase has around $ 3 billion in TVL and $ 14 billion in Bridged TVL. Base Claims transaction costs of less than one cent, so that it is placed far below Ethereum or Solana.
Even with the low costs it claims, the chain costs reached millions of dollars at the end of March and early April 2024 for a few days in a period of 24 hours.
With the founding tires with opt -stack from Optimism, the apps that overlap somewhat overlap with the competitive liquidity of Arbitrum Aave and Uniswap based on the base.