Can Arbitrum’s Organic Growth Leave Layer-2 Competitors like Optimism out of Picture?

September has been a busy month for Layer-2 platforms especially as the Ethereum Merge took away most of the market limelight. Nonetheless, Arbitrum’s steady growth has been baffling, to say the least. 

Arbitrum is a Layer-2 blockchain built on top of Ethereum, with the objective of enabling faster transactions and greater scalability. Despite the predominantly bearish sentiment in the crypto space, Arbitrum has remained in the news. 

On Sept. 21, NFT marketplace OpenSea plans to support Arbitrum in an effort to give customers ‘access to the NFTs they want on the chains they prefer.’ The OpenSea x Arbitrum news along with the launch of the Nitro upgrade in September has garnered tremendous social attention for the project. 

Arbitrum continues to dominate the market

In terms of total value locked, Arbitrum had the largest market share of TVL among L2s. Arbitrum held over $2.39 billion in TVL with a 51% market share among other major L2s followed by Optimism with a 29.91% market share.

Source: L2Beat

Over the last week, however, with fading social anticipation and macro market bearishness, Arbitrum’s TVL had fallen by 3.9%. 

That said, Arbitrum’s TVL for the quarter was roughly flat, noteworthy given that Arbitrum, unlike its peer Optimism, hasn’t launched a token that can be used to incentivize TVL natively. 

With the ETH Merge done, Layer-2s are expected to see a bump in efficiency which could further secure Arbitrum’s network.  

Arbitrum remains vibrant

Quarter-over-quarter the daily transactions for Arbitrum’s saw a 62.7%  growth despite an unfavorable macroenvironment. Additionally, higher investor confidence in the protocol could be seen in the high deposits as compared to the withdrawals. 

Daily transactions | Source: The Tie Report

Notably, deposits made 53.66% of the total Q3 activity with deposits outweighing withdrawals by 231%. 

Furthermore, The Tie report noted that Arbitrum’s ability to maintain consistent growth without some of the incentive advantages of its peers makes it noteworthy.

In the near term, Arbitrum’s healthy DeFi scene should continue to see new user growth. In addition to that, if the protocol plans to roll out a token, then token launch anticipation alongside strong marketing campaigns could continue favoring the platform’s growth. 

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