OurNetwork #118

Apr 22

About the editor: Spencer Noon is Co-founder & General Partner at Variant.

Network Coverage
Coverage on Arbitrum, Aztec, zkSync, and Optimism.

① Arbitrum

Arbitrum is the leading Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution. Home to 300+ dApps and over $3.5b TVL, Arbitrum leads the Layer 2 space with over 50% market share, just recently passing over 11m transactions after just launching in August of last year. Arbitrum contains 12 of the top 25 Ethereum DeFi projects by TVL and shows no signs of slowing down with the deployment of Aave V3 last month.

NFT projects continue to see growth on Arbitrum on average, with already over $2m traded halfway through April. Average sales price of each NFT on Arbitrum also continues to rise up from ~$574 to ~$1,416 month over month. Major contributors to this growth include Treasure and Dopex ecosystem NFTs.

The number of unique addresses just surpassed over 500k, likely due to the amount of NFT projects launching that offer users a new way to interact with their NFTs at a much cheaper price, without sacrificing the security of their assets.

zkSync is a ZK rollup solving Ethereum scalability with zero security compromises. Live with payment support since June 2020, zkSync 1.0 has processed over 7.3m transactions. In the background, the Matter Labs team has been focused on building zkSync 2.0, which has been live on testnet since Feb 2022. Powered by zkEVM, zkSync 2.0 is the first EVM compatible ZK rollup bringing Solidity developers the scaling, security and UX benefits of zero knowledge proofs.

Despite the lack of smart contract functionality, zkSync 1.0 continues to see healthy growth. There have been more than 378k transactions from ETH Mainnet to zkSync by more than 257k unique addresses. Transactions from ETH Mainnet to zkSync have grown more than 573% and unique addresses ~1,219% YoY.

At time of writing, zkSync 1.0 currently has ~$132.4m TVL. TVL reached an all-time high in March 2022 of $163m. The mainnet release of zkSync 2.0 could usher in the next wave of innovation unlocked by the combination of ZKPs with EVM compatibility and composability.

Aztec Network is the privacy layer for web3: a zkRollup offering cheap, private transactions on Ethereum. Aztec's first-party private payments app, zk.money, is nearing $100m in all-time deposits and 60k registered users, with steady growth since launch. In the next month, the team will launch Aztec Connect, the first private bridge to Ethereum DeFi, unlocking privacy and scale for leading DeFi projects like Element and Lido.

Meanwhile, Aztec has crossed 4,200 shielded ETH in the system, with over $15m total TVL. The network already supports confidential payments, and the addition of DeFi yield opportunities should dramatically increase system TVL.

Aztec's privacy-first zkRollup has also amassed a significant anonymity set, with the 0.1 ETH deposit set ~60% of the size of Tornado Cash's for the same deposit amount. The complexity of private internal transfers and private DeFi inherently make de-anonymization of transactions much harder.