EVM - 4. The “Flippening” Comparison

What are we looking for?

It finally happened. The great Flip everyone’s been waiting for — Optimism and Arbitrum have officially surpassed Ethereum in combined transaction volume. (What, you were expecting some other flippening?)

Use this historic event to compare and contrast these two major L2 chains. Include metrics such as total and average transaction volume, average transaction size, active users, new users added, and anything else you find relevant to this comparison.

Optimism and Arbitrum flip Ethereum in combined transaction volume

Ethereum layer-2 on-chain activity has been increasing to the extent that the leading two networks now process more transaction volume than mainnet Ethereum.

Layer-2 networks Arbitrum and Optimism have seen an increase in transactions over the past three months. Comparatively, aside from a few spikes, transactions on the Ethereum network have declined by around 33% since late October, according to Etherscan.

This has enabled the two L2s combined to flip Ethereum for this metric, according to Dune Analytics data.

The chart shows Ethereum processed over 1.06 million transactions on Jan. 10, whereas Arbitrum and Optimism combined processed over 1.12 million transactions.

Additionally, Optimism has now surpassed Arbitrum in terms of daily transactions following a steady uptrend in activity since September.

Layer-2 ecosystem analytics website L2beat reported all L2 activity in terms of transactions per second (TPS) surpassed that of Ethereum in October, and has remained above it since.

Methodology

In this dashboard we compare the Optimism and Arbitrum in past 60 days in section of :

1- Daily Transactions and fee

2-Daily Users and new users

3-Daily STPM and Fail rate transactions

4-Distribution of users volume transactions

5-Actions

6-Users retention

Definitions

Transactions Per Minute (TPM)- Total Transactions Per Minute( includes Success+Fail transactions)
Success Transactions Per Minute (STPM) - The STPM is a better indicator for measuring the speed of the blockchain because only successful transactions which generate the real value are counted instead of total transactions which include the failed ones that are wasted computation.
Transaction Fail Rate (TFR) - As discussed in STPM, TFR indicates the percentage of wasted calculation during each period of time.

Optimism success transactions after 17:00 until 1:00 in all of days decrease and after that we see increase in success transaction per minute.

Arbitrum success transactions on Saturday after 20:00 till 2:00 on Sunday decrease.

Total actions that taken in Optimism is more than 140M and for Arbitrum iss about 40M in past 60 days.

About 60% of this actions related to transfer and after that approval and swaps is in second and third place.

Also here we can see that 31% of actions are not named and they are null.

In daily actions we see more transfer, approval and swap than other actions.

Users Retention

We can see that on November till beginning of December the Number of Daily transactions in Arbitrum is almost twice of daily transactions in Optimism. After December 18, we see the daily transactions of Arbitrum and Optimism is close but in total the daily transactions of Optimism after December 18 is more.

Optimism daily fee of transaction has rising trend and the different between Arbitrum and Optimism fee volume on Jan 14, reach about 64 ETH. Arbitrum fee compare to Optimism fee has no significant trend.

On November 30, we see highest transactions volume in ETH for Optimism and Arbitrum. Daily volume of transactions in Arbitrum is more than Optimism.

Except few days daily Average volume per transactions of Arbitrum is more than 2 times of Optimism daily Average volume per transactions of.

And daily Average fee per transactions of Optimism is more than Arbitrum.

Total Success transaction per minute of Arbitrum is 371 and STPM of Optimism is 320 in past 60 days.

Fail transaction per minute of Arbitrum and Optimism are 11.51 and 11.9 respectively.

and Fail rate of Arbitrum and Optimism are 3% and 3.5% respectively.

We can see that daily transactions per minute in Arbitrum has decrease from 8 to 5 transactions but daily transactions per minute of Optimism has increase from 4 to 8 transactions.

Success transactions per minute of Arbitrum has decreasing trend but success transactions per minute of Optimism has increasing trend.

Also in most of days daily Fail rate of transactions on Optimism is more than Arbitrum and it is less than 5%.

On December 30, we see highest percent of fail rate transactions for Arbitrum and it is about 19.7%.

Actions

Fail and Success transactions detail

Average time to user back and have another transaction in Arbitrum is almost a day or 24 hours but for Optimism the average time is about 0.3 of a day or 7 hours.

74% of users transactions in Arbitrum transfer less than 0.1ETH and 77% of users transactions in Optimism transfer less than 0.1ETH.

1.6% of users in Arbitrum transactions is more than 10 ETH. and 4.7% of users transactions is 1 to 5 ETH.

Average new users in past 60 days for Arbitrum and Optimism is 10.5K and 9.09K respectively.

Daily active users in Arbitrum in end of November is about 60K and for Optimism is about 40 but we see that decreasing trend for Arbitrum active users till Jan 1 after that it increase and decrease again to 40K daily active users.

The number of daily new users of Arbitrum and Optimism are close but since December 20 till December 30 we see the number of daily new user in Optimism increase.

Total number of new users in Optimism and Arbitrum are 630K and 545K respectively in past 60 days.

About 50% of users in Optimism have less than 5 transactions and 25% of them have more than 50 transactions. 8% of them have 10 to 20 transactions.

About 63.3% of users in Arbitrum have less than 5 transactions and 12% of them have between 5 and 10 transactions. 9% of them have 10 to 20 transactions.

Conclusion

Distribution of users volume transactions

Daily Users and New Users

STPM, FTPM, Fail Rate Transactions