According to Starkscan, the total value locked in the network has reached a record peak of $5.2 million.
Over the last three months, Ethereum layer-2 on-chain activity has been increasing significantly, to the point that the two leading networks now process more transactions than the Ethereum mainnet. According to Etherscan, Ethereum transactions have dropped by around 33% since late October, with Arbitrum and Optimism combined now overtaking Ethereum in terms of this metric, as per Dune Analytics data.
The chart shows that on Jan. 10, the two L2s combined processed over 1.12 million transactions, compared to Ethereum’s 1.06 million. Optimism has surpassed Arbitrum in terms of daily transactions due to sustained growth in activity since September.
As reported by L2beat, the total Layer-2 transactions per second (TPS) surpass that of Ethereum since October, with Ethereum currently averaging at 12 TPS and the L2s at 16.5 TPS. Arbitrum One is the market leader in terms of total value locked (TVL) at $2.34 billion (with a 52.5% market share) and Optimism is the runner-up with a TVL of $1.28 billion (with a 28.6% market share). Martin Lee, a Nansen researcher, has suggested that DeFi protocols are one of the main reasons for Optimism’s adoption. Other layer twos such as zk-rollup StarkNet have also seen a rise in transactions recently, with StarkScan reporting the network’s TVL at an all-time high of $5.2 million.
In October, it was reported that StarkNet was processing more transactions per week than the Bitcoin network.