What is the Question?🚨

The holidays and New Year are often chaotic in the crypto and defi space, as users make a spree of new transactions and wallets as they receive (and give) some cash and coins as holiday gifts.

How has this activity impacted the broader Ethereum ecosystems? Are users creating new wallets or buying tokens with their newfound holiday wealth? Are they staking all these new tokens once they get them? Or are they selling tokens to pay for their own gifts and holiday travel?

Choose an Ethereum chain, fork or Layer 2, such as BSC, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, or Mainnet.

Create a dashboard that captures activity across metrics such as new users onboarding, token prices, NFT prices, or any other notable trends or events for your chosen chain. Feel free to examine multiple chains or ecosystems in your dashboard.

Analyzed Topics:

1. Number of Transactions and Users and Spent Fee
2. New Users
3. ETH Transfer Activity
4. Staking Activity
5. NFT Sales Activity
6. Swap Activity
7. Price Correlations

Introduction🚩

What is Optimism?

Optimism is a layer 2 chain, meaning it functions on top of Ethereum mainnet (layer 1). Transactions take place on Optimism, but the data about transactions get posted to mainnet where they are validated. It’s like driving in a less crowded side street while benefiting from the security of a highway.

Optimism is the second-largest Ethereum layer 2 with a total of $313 million locked into its smart contracts, as of this writing, according to Defi Llama. Arbitrum comes first with $1.32 billion.

Synthetix, a derivatives liquidity protocol, is the largest protocol on Optimism, with a total value locked (TVL) of $125 million. Uniswap, a decentralized exchange (DEX), is the second most popular protocol on the chain. As of this writing, there are 35 protocols on Optimism with at least $1,000 locked into their smart contracts.

More Info

How does Optimism work?

Optimism uses a technology called rollups, specifically Optimistic rollups.

They’re called rollups because they roll up (or bundle) the data about hundreds of transactions – non-fungible token (NFT) mints, token swaps … any transaction! – into a single transaction on Ethereum mainnet (layer 1). When so many transactions are rolled up into a single transaction, the blockchain transaction, or "gas," fee required to pay comes down to only one transaction, conveniently distributed across everyone involved.

And they’re called Optimistic rollups because transactions are assumed to be valid until they are proven false, or in other words, innocent until proven guilty. There’s a time window during which potentially invalid transactions can be challenged by submitting a “fraud proof” and running the transactions’ computations with reference to available state data. Optimism reimburses the gas needed to run the computation of the fraud proof. (Here’s a more technically detailed explanation of the process.)

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Method⚡

In this dashboard i explored Optimism network activity in past 30 days since December 15th. 15 days before and 15 days after start of 2023, a total of 30 days.

I analyzed different parts of this chain like overall transactions and users, New users, Staking activity, Swapping activity, NFTs activity, ETH transfer activity and price correlations at the end where i compared optimism’s native token $OP to other popular tokens in the mentioned timeframe.

For this purpose i used ==Optimism.core== database provided by Flipsidecrypto and filtered the data since 2022-12-15.

> Also i divided this timeframe into 3 periods: > > > 1. ==Before Holidays: December 15th until December 24th== > 2. ==Holidays: December 24th until December 31th== > 3. ==After Holidays or New Year: January 1st until Jan 14th==

Findings👀

• Charts above are showing clearly that the number of daily transactions has increased slightly day by day after the beginning of 2023 and peaked on Jan 12th with over 800K number of transactions on a single day for Optimism network. If number of transactions increase, then spent fees will increase too because users are paying fees to make the transactions on blockchain. But number of users has decreased after new year and it seems users went to vacations or off-days after the new year.
• Not even Jan 12th, but all of the days that i analyzed since Dec 15th had Transfer as their highest number of transaction category. Mint was in the second.
• In past 30 days since Dec 15th, users has made over 8M transfers, Almost 7M more than the second category which is Mint.

2. New Users

1. Number of Transactions and Users and Spent Fee

Findings👀

• In past 30 days, Optimism has gained its highest number of new users before christmas day and this trend slowly dropped until start of 2023. On recent days, this chain didnt gain any serious movement on new users chart and looks like users are out of the market and doing their things in this period like vacation or hanging out and etc.. .
• Optimism gained over 300K new users in just 10 days before Dec 24th.

3. ETH Transfer Activity

Findings👀

• As i said, Transfer volume started to increase after new year and the highest stats belong to Jan 13th with over 120M in USD.
• In overall, Optimism has recorded much more recivers than senders in this timeframe since Dec 15th. Also number of receivers has recorded a massive dropdown after start of 2023 and went under senders.
• Right chart are showing us that Transfer activity has preformed better after the new year than before it in 15 days before and after timeframe.

4. Staking Activity

Findings👀

• As previous section, Staking actions is also performed better after the new year like transfer and most of the activity belong to Jan 13th.
• Bottom charts are confirming this with showing the stats by periods and we can see that most of the staking actions recorded by first time delegators and they were self delegations.

5. NFT Sales Activity

Findings👀

• NFT Sales and purchasers and sellers has decreased after start of new year but the usd volume chart seems bullish after the new year. After first few days of new year and its first week, these stats started to recover themselves after a huge fall on Jan 1st, and usd volume recovered faster than others.
• Recent days NFT sales volume mostly belong to optimistic explorer - get started nft. Same for NFT sales.

Findings👀

• These charts are showing top nft collections on optimism divided by periods after Dec 15th in terms of sales and USD volume.
• The most NFT sales on optimism belong to holidays period while the most Sales volume has consumed after holidays and new year.
• Optimistic explorer and apetimism launchpad has recorded the most usd volume and sales after holidays.

6. Swap Activity

Findings👀

• Swap activity on Optimism is also performed better after the second week of 2023 and the charts are going up with a good upward trend.
• Over 95% of Optimism swap activity belong to Velodrome and seems like optimism users would love to support optimism built-in platforms than others like sushiswap.
• Most of Velodrome activity belong to after holidays as i said and holidays period has the lowest stats and it is logical too.

Findings👀

• These charts are showing popular swapping pools/pairs on Velodrome by swaps and swap usd volume.
• OP/USDC Pool is the most popular swap pool on velodrome following by WETH/USDC in the second place.
• Looks like USDC is the most popular stablecoin among optimism swappers.
• OP/USDC pool has recorded over 64M USD Volume by over 210K swaps in past 30 days since Dec 15th.

7. Price Correlations

Findings👀

• In this chart, i compared $OP price, optimism native token with some other popular tokens or coins like WETH,WBTC,MATIC,AVAX and BNB.
• It seems that $OP performed better than others and its price increased above 60% after start of the new year. But other tokens has moved pretty much the same and increased almost 20% after start of 2023.

Conclusion💡

• Mostly, Optimism ecosystem performed better after holidays and Jan 1st and by far after 2 weeks since start of 2023, the charts seems bullish and going up and in overall the network is doing good as well as its native token which has increased almost 60% after Jan 1st.
• Users are getting back mostly to trading or nft flipping or staking or whatever they do on Optimism after holidays and the charts after a massive dropdown on holidays, slowly started to recover themselves.
• Optimism users are mostly doing their swap activity and stuff on Velodrome, One of the popular optimism’s platforms and supporting the network with this purpose. They didnt prefer sushiswap to trade on in past 30 days as we saw earlier.
• Most of the transaction activity on Optimism belong to Transfer category with over 8M recorded transactions in past 30 days after Dec 15th followed by NFT minting activity.
• Transfer/Bridge and interacting with NFTs are the most popular things that optimism users did since December 15th.
• Although activity on Optimism has increased after the new year, but this chain didnt record daily new users that joined into optimism like before.

Author: Sbhn_NP

Discord : Sbhn_NP#8717

Twitter : Sbhn_np

Instagram : Sbhn_NP

Thanks for your time!

Findings👀

• These charts are showing the top 10 NFT collections on optimism in past 30 days after Dec 15th in terms of sales and USD volume.
• As i mentioned earlier, optimistic explorer is the most sold nft collection in this timeframe with over 10K sales and 100K USD volume following by Mirror in the second place with almost 8K sales and 60K USD volume.