An overview of the current status of the four mainstream Layer2 solutions: Arbtrium accounts for more than half of the market share

Original author: OurNetwork

Original compilation: Felix, PANews

Currently, the Layer 2 market has entered a stage of fierce competition. The author of this article analyzed the market performance of four mainstream Layer 2 solutions, including Optimism, Arbitrum, Zora and Public Goods Network, based on multiple data such as total transaction fees, number of addresses, gas fees and number of users.

Optimism: The total cost of the Layer 2 network based on OP Stack reaches 4400 ETH, and the gas supported per second is approximately 3.7 times that of Ethereum.

In February 2023, Optimism announced its vision for a hyperchain, which seeks to integrate the originally isolated L2 into a single interoperable and composable system. Today, Optimism is launching Ethereum L2 based on OP Stack, including OP Mainnet, Base, Zora Network and Public Goods Network. In August, the total transaction fees on these four chains were 4,400 ETH, and the net on-chain revenue was 2,200 ETH (fees minus L1 data costs).

The transaction fees of OP Stack Chain are divided into:

*L1 Fee: Data fee paid to L1 Ethereum. Profits become L2 revenue.

• L2 basic cost: Gas used by L2, priced according to the EIP 1559 model, L2 income.
• L2 priority fee: Tip, L2 income

L1 fees have always been the majority of user fees, but L2 fees have also taken up a share recently.


Hyperchain's vision includes "making it easy to create horizontally scalable... web applications." In the past 30 days, these four chains have supported 4.6 million Gas per second, which is 3.7 times that of Ethereum L1, but the overall utilization rate is only 46%.


Taking the transaction of Aerodrome on the Base network as an example, we can gain an in-depth understanding of the accumulation of transaction fees in the system. Transactions used:

• 3100 L1 Gas, paid 19 Gwei L1 Gas price
• 178,800 L2 Gas, paying 0.016 Gwei L2 basic fee *The user paid an additional 0.00000052 Gwei L2 priority fee

The transaction fee can then be calculated as follows: (3.1 k* 19) + ( 178.8 k* 0.016) + ( 178.8 k* 0.00000052) = 0.00005 ETH (0.09 USD). This fee accounts for 94.4% of the L1 fee, 5.6% of the L2 basic fee, and nearly 0% of the L2 priority fee.

Arbitrum: Occupying more than 54% of the Layer 2 market share

Arbitrum is an Ethereum scaling solution with two chains: Arbitrum One (optimistic rollup) and Arbitrum Nova (universal AnyTrust solution). Both solutions run on the Nitro technology stack. Currently, Arbitrum One occupies nearly 54.3% of the Layer 2 market share, leading in both DEX trading volume and the number of bridged ETH. Nova has added support for 3 new CEXs (Kraken, Bybit, Crypto.com) and the number of transactions has increased to approximately 6.6 million transactions per month (compared to approximately 800,000 transactions at the beginning of the year).

Additionally, Arbitrum released Orbit in March, which allows developers to easily and license-free deploy customizable Layer 3 to fit Arbitrum One or Nova. Xai Games recently deployed a testnet based on Orbit.


Since the launch of Arbitrum One in August 2021, derivatives trading volumes have remained healthy, even during a bear market. Arbitrum One's 24-hour trading volume is $334 million, up 16% over the past 30 days.


Proof of Play migrated its fully on-chain RPG Pirate Nation to Arbitrum Nova and observed a 20x reduction in gas costs. As part of Pirate Nation UX, gas fees are borne by the user; Nova's efficiency helps the team profit from royalties on resales after accounting for gas costs.

Related reading: Arbitrum vs. Optimism: A new round of red-blue war begins at Layer 3

Zora Network: The total transaction volume exceeds 7 million, and the number of creators in a single month exceeds 40,000

Zora is a platform for creators and collectors to mint NFTs. It has tens of thousands of creators and nearly one million collectors. It recently launched Layer 2 on OP Stack. Among them, more than 40,000 creators used Zora's network in August this year, and the number of creators increased by 97.51% month-on-month. In addition, Zora's transaction volume has tripled month-on-month since June, with total transaction volume exceeding 7 million.



To date, Zora has over 300,000 unique addresses bridged to the Zora network. In the past 2 months (July to September), Zora’s bridge wallet has grown nearly 7 times.


Finally, when examining OP market share growth, it is clear that ZORA's share of total expenses continues to grow steadily. Even with the introduction of Base and PGN, ZORA’s share of OP Stack Chains has now reached 10%, indicating that the shift to L2 is resonating with NFT collectors and creators.


The deal is for the deployment of Openen Threadition OE, the result of a collaboration between Threadguy and Jack Butcher on Zora (July 16, 2023). Threadguy is a well-known NFT KOL who expressed interest in changing his PFP and updating it to the Openopen version of his Mutant Ape. Jack Butcher then launched a customized open version of the NFT "Opepen Threadition" and handed all proceeds to Threadguy. Currently, over 70,000 NFTs have been minted in this series and generated sales of 128 ETH, while the total transaction fee for users is only 3 ETH. It was the largest L2 OE at the time, paving the way for other creators to start releasing works outside of L1.

Public Goods Network: After the mainnet was launched at the end of July, the number of accounts was approximately 13,000, and Zora and Gitcoin Grants Stack have been deployed.

Public Goods Network (PGN) is a low-cost Layer 2 OP chain, a highly composable EVM-compatible rollup, almost the same as the OP main network, and built on the OP Stack. The PGN mainnet was launched on July 25. PGN is supported by Public Nouns, Clr.fund, Giveth, Hypercerts, Octant, Endaoment, Eco, Protocol Labs and Gitcoin. PGN will collect the vast majority of sequencer fees generated by users’ transactions on the network to fund public goods and public goods projects. Since its launch, PGN has created 12,474 unique wallets.

The Ethereum infrastructure running on PGN was the second largest round of GG 18, which had 11,955 unique donors, $123,900 in contributions, and 67,700 donations. Gitcoin grants have had a huge impact on transaction volumes and demonstrate the potential for sustainable revenue in the future.


As of September 3, a total of more than 281 ETH has been bridged to PGN, and the number of contracts exceeds 930, including Zora, jokerace, Safe and Gitcoin Grants Stack, which have been deployed on PGN. Future Gitcoin rounds will also include bridging GTC (Gitcoin’s token) as well as bridging stablecoins.

PGN Mints NFT is the first mint on Zora and is one of the first use cases for PGN other than grants. PGN will raise public goods resources by allowing users to conduct transactions on the chain, which shows the commitment of deploying "fees for good" on PGN to create a sustainable source of public goods funding.