Optimism Bridge vs Synthetix Bridge

There are a few bridges users can use to bridge in/out of Optimism. Today we'll be comparing the main bridge to an external bridge namely Synthetix. We'll be looking at what users deposited in each bridge in terms of $, so we can compare apples to apples and speculate as to the motivations of the users.

Transaction Number

What is visible here is that a not of users bridged into optimism around the dates that users speculated that there would be an airdrop (using the Optimism official bridge), whereas, in the case of the Synthetix bridge contract, we can see that there were a lot of transactions a day after the bridge contract was created and ever since it's been fluctuating around 15-50 a day. In the case of Synthetix users are migrating assets by burning them from one side to the other side, specifically SNX. Whereas on the other front, users moving into Optimism using the Optimism Bridge is probably due to speculation about an OP airdrop. We'll investigate this further, but first, let's look at $ the amounts deposited.

Amount $ Deposited

It seems that, at least for mainnet -> Optimism, the amount matches up with the peak in terms of Transaction count, which indicates a lot of small single transactions per user rather than multiple transactions per user to get the airdrop. Compared to Synthetix where the biggest amount bridged looks like it was on a day with only ~ 67 transactions which make it seem as if there was some whale movement there. Let's confirm by looking at some averages...

Average amount per transaction & per user

What we again see here is that for Synthetix the biggest spike when you normalize everything comes probably from 1-2 big transactions rather than 67 wallets depositing about 457k$ each. In the case of the Optimism main bridge, it seems that there are multiple spikes, even before the major spike of 1.31M is bridged, in fact, this is a local minimum. This helps to support the fact that the average user/transaction bridging onto Optimism that day was small and was just in order to receive the airdrop.

Transactions per User

Last, but not least let's look at how many transactions each active user has performed over time. This should help give us an indication or at least a proxy to speculate against what the purpose of the transaction was. Other than May 4-6th, which seems to be an outlier in the grander scale of things, the main Optimism bridge has had on average 1 TX per user which again helps to support the fact that most users did 1-2 transactions just to get the airdrop. On the other side, we see exactly the same behaviour, but this is probably due to the fact that there's not that much activity and that users on average have a different intention primarily and that is not to get an airdrop of OP at least before the announcement date.

Summary

From above and with some minor speculation we can see that the majority of users, used Optimism bridge to just get the airdrop. There's not that much to do currently on Optimism and it will take quite a while for the activity there to truly ramp up I feel like as it will always be trumped by that initial inflow of people that wanted the token airdrop. That being said there are dapps on Optimism and if the bridge becomes a little more incentivised to help with bridging fees, I'm sure users will jump right at the opportunity to bridge over for lower fees. Also due to the rocky launch users may shy away from bridging major amounts and using the ecosystem for a little while.

Liquidity incentives always help, and nothing yet has been announced, so at least for now, I remain "Optimistic".