What is the Question?🚨

What is the volume of ETH and three stablecoins of your choice that's moved between the Optimism network and the Ethereum network across the bridge?

How has that changed over time? Note any interesting trends or outliers that you see.

Analyzed Topics:

1. ETH Deposited
2. ETH Withdrawn
3. USDC Deposited
4. USDC Withdrawn

Introduction🚩

In blockchain terminology, a bridge is a tool that enables users to send assets from one blockchain to another. The reason why a bridge is required to do this is because different blockchains have different token standards, hence, why a bridge is required to port tokens from one token standard (e.g Solana’s SPL) to another (e.g Ethereum’s ERC-20).

Bridging can also be done within the same blockchain for a variety of reasons like avoiding high transaction fees, the Optimism bridge is a tool that functions on the Ethereum mainnet, used to bridge assets to and from the Ethereum network majorly to avoid high gas fees on Ethereum.

Method⚡

In this dashboard I’ll shed light on the volume of ETH and USDC that’s moved between the Optimism and Ethereum networks via the Optimism bridge ( 0x99c9fc46f92e8a1c0dec1b1747d010903e884be1) since the start of 2022.

For this dashboard, all data is from January 1, 2022 to September 14, 2022.

• To get inflows via the bridge, I selected token transfers from the ez_eth_transfers and ez_token_transfers tables for ETH and USDC deposits respectively, where the to_address is Optimism bridge’s contract address.
• To get outflows, I did the same as above, selecting transactions where the from_address is Optimism bridge’s contract address.

Findings👀

• By month, August had the most ETH deposited via the Optimism bridge with 117.9K ETH deposited. 72.8% of ETH deposits in August were done in two days, August 4th and 5th, this surge in deposits followed AAVE’s announcement of the optimism liquidity mining program on the 4th of August.

  Another day where we see high deposit amounts is June 1st, the day after Optimism announced its airdrop. 13K ETH was deposited on that day.

• ETH Deposited saw another spike on Sep 19th too.

• Taking a look at the monthly ETH deposit chart, the volume of ETH deposited was in a downtrend in the first quarter of the year, an uptrend followed in the second quarter slowing down in the start of the third quarter in July before the August surge.

• April had more unique depositors than any other month - 15.8K while July had the lowest - 2,423.

ETH Deposited

ETH Withdrawn

Findings👀

• 3,489 ETH was withdrawn via the bridge on June 8, this has been the highest daily ETH withdrawal in 2022 so far. Unsurprisingly, June had the highest withdrawal volume by month - 13.8K ETH.
• For the most part of the year, there was a correlation between the volume of ETH withdrawal transactions and unique withdrawers. By the end of July, this correlation was no longer apparent as the cumulative total of both metrics started diverging.
• There’s no clear trend in the monthly withdrawal chart, this may be because fewer wallets are withdrawing compared to the wallets depositing, hence, total withdrawals by month can easily be influenced by a sparse number of wallets making huge withdrawals. For example, only 2 unique wallets withdrew ETH via the bridge in August but those 2 wallets withdrew more ETH - 6,129 than the 40 unique wallets that withdrew 3,658 ETH in May.

USDC Deposited

Findings👀

• Similar to the ETH chart, there were large volumes of USDC deposits around the period the OP airdrop was announced and when AAVE announced the Optimism liquidity mining program. 53.3M USDC was deposited on the 30th of May while the 5th of August had the highest daily USDC deposit 80.8M USDC.
• From the monthly deposit chart, there’s an uptrend in the monthly deposit volume of USDC via the bridge.
• Unique USDC depositors and USDC transaction volume mirror each other more often than not.

USDC Withdrawn

Findings👀

• There has been an uptrend in monthly withdrawal volumes, peaking in August with 141.28M USDC withdrawn.
• The volume of USDC withdrawn in the first quarter of the year was comparatively low. The second quarter also started on a low note as April had the second lowest monthly withdrawal volume in 2022 so far - 2.43M. June carried the second quarter, with 18 times more withdrawal volume compared to April.
• USDC withdrawals via the bridge is not that common, on multiple occasions there have been as much as 5 day gaps between withdrawals. In fact, while USDC deposits via the bridge had 2,197 transactions in the first half of the year, USDC withdrawals had 17 times less transactions - 129 in the same timeframe.

Conclusion💡

• As we’ve seen with the airdrop and liquidity mining program announcements, announcements that involve OP rewards brings about increase in deposit volumes via the Optimism bridge.
• There are more wallets depositing via the bridge than withdrawing.
• Across the bridge, ETH deposit was highest in August, while withdrawals was highest in June.
• USDC deposits and withdrawals was highest in August.

Author: Sbhn_NP

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Thanks for your time!