📝 Editor's Note:
Welcome to OurNetwork's latest coverage of Layer 2s, the scaling solutions that typically resolve on Ethereum's mainnet.
This issue comes at a pivotal time — the crypto community is actively debating what roles Layer 2s should have relative to Ethereum's main chain. Critics argue that the scaling solutions have proved parasitic to mainnet, diverting revenue away from Ethereum and siloing liquidity. Proponents, however, say L2s have delivered on their promise to deliver secure and affordable scalability to the Ethereum ecosystem, with the expectation that ETH's price will follow these advancements.
OurNetwork's team of cracked analysts will get into the details below, starting with growthepie's overview of the L2 space. Hunter, Katerina, Surf Query, and Reza will follow, outlining the latest in onchain data across leading platforms — Arbitrum, Optimism, Abstract, and Blast.
On a chaotic week in global markets, let's get into it.
– ON Editorial Team
Layer 2s 🚅
L2 Overview | Arbitrum | Optimism | Abstract | Blast
👥 growthepie | Website | Dashboard
📈 Ethereum's activity growth comes almost entirely from Layer 2s
Since 2023, Layer 2s (L2s) have seen rapid growth in weekly active addresses. Most of this growth comes from wallets used on a single L2. Wallets active on multiple L2s or cross-layer make up only ~5% in recent weeks. In 2023, single L2 usage was ~20% of Ethereum’s active addresses, now it’s near 80%. Growth has plateaued slightly since early this year, but is expected to rise again after Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade, which will increase blob capacity.
✏️ Editor's Note:
Blobs are temporary storage spaces on Ethereum's mainnet which are primarily used by L2s to post their transaction data. Currently, blobs are deleted after ~18 days, but that's long enough for L2s' transaction data to be verified.
L2s consume a lot of data. In the past 365 days, this has increased by over 17x monthly. Most of this growth has come from Eclipse, an L2 which consumes over 80% of the data posted to Celestia. Base, Coinbase's L2, is the largest consumer of Ethereum blobs, accounting for just under 40% of data posted.
