Data & Analysis

I am going to start with stats related to bridging ETH from L1 to different L2s using Hop Bridge. Bars colors are matched with the L2 brand and this will help you recognize them more easily.

Some Insights:

• It is obvious that Arbitrum is the most popular L2 to bridge ETH from Hop. Although the volume is almost constantly decreasing from its peak at Jan 24th week with more than 8000 ETH, But beside two recent week arbitrum was always the number 1 in this field.
• Optimism managed to defeat Arbitrum in two weeks that are related and close to OP launch, while its rivalry with Polygon was more close and the lead changed so many times.

Introduction

After a basic introduction to Hop User and Volume stats, now it is time to dive deeper into Hop Bridge and its performance in past months. Hop has been the go-to bridge for many DEFI user for some time now, whether it was for airdrop possibilities or the simple and useful tools it provided.

You can say that hop was the first serious alternative for L2 Native bridges. After Arbitrum and Optimism launched their mainnet and started te receive more attraction, a lot of people paid too much gas fee to test these bridges, and it took a while where you could bridge to L2s with something other than their own native bridge.

Methodology

In this Analysis we are going to:

• Calculate volume bridged to Arbitrum, Optimism and Polygon using Hop Exchange, comparing to their native bridges.
• Calculate Total Value Locked in Hop on Ethereum L1 Chain (Also divided by tokens)

Some Notes:

• For the ease of use and necessary distinctions, I divided most of the charts in two part, one for ETH related stats and one for stable coins (USDC, USDT, DAI).
• I chose the past 4 month as the time period for TVL Section.
• TVL is calculated for L1 bridge only since it is not yet available to query L2 data on flipside database (soon will be).

Second chart move us from Hop to each chain native bridge and the amount of ETH bridged through them.

• As it is obvious (and some how disturbing the chart!), Polygon Native chain is very popular for bridging ETH from L1 to Polygon. It is not surprising to see polygon is performing way better than Arbitrum and Optimism because of its high level of adoption through crypto dApps.

To be able to compare better, you can see Arbitrum and Optimism stats separately on next two charts.

• Arbitrum native bridge and Hop Bridge for Arbitrum are performing independently and showing different stats on different times. they both managed to defeat one another and there is no obvious victory.
• But in Optimism case, native bridge is performing better in most cases; For example, Hop bridge peak was over 6000 while native bridge accounted for more than 30000 on the same date.

As our last chart shows, stable coins TVL didn't changed dramatically or even significantly until very recently, while ETH TVL is identical to total TVL chart and is decreasing as the price of ETH decrease

Following same path for stable coins we can say that everything seems identical to ETH bridge in terms of Arbitrum dominance, closr rivalry between Polygon and Optimism, and few recent victories of optimism over Arbitrum. Also Native bridges are performing better in almost every week than the Hop Bridge for stable coins.

I separated Arbitrum and Optimism charts again to see it more accurately

Now enough with comparison, Lets focus on Hop and its TVL. As mentioned before following numbers are not accurate in the sense that they are not including L2>L2 TVL. This is only USD value of locked assets from L1 bridge. This assets will be locked and new equivalent L2 of them are minted.

With all that said, there is 38.3 million TVL for Hop L1 bridges, and in the second chart you can see how it decreased over the past 4 months. The reason is not related to Hop itself, but the overall condition of market and specially ETH price which is responsible for a good share in Hop TVL.