The new year also starts well for Layer-2, which with Arbitrum and Optimism marks new historical highs

The Layer-2 rally

The revival of Bitcoin's bullish trend at the beginning of 2024 seems to have also energized the entire crypto sector, with distinctions only in the intensity of the price movement.

Following the rumors that the BTC spot ETF in the US is getting ever closer, Bitcoin leads the sentiment as always, and behind it the Layer-1s seem to be the real surprise of this cycle. However, Ethereum closely follows the first of the cryptocurrencies, and the Layer-2 sector, i.e. all ETH scalability solutions, is no different.

On the contrary, it is precisely some tokens of these L2s that register new ATHs, such as Arbitrum (ARB) and Optimism (OP), which respectively mark +31.7% and +16.5% in the last seven days.

ARB has reached a record market capitalization of 2.3 billion dollars, while OP records peaks in daily volumes of half a billion.

Arbitrum and Optimism data

Precisely these two L2 solutions are the queens of the sector, and their performance demonstrates how the Ethereum network continues to prosper especially in the face of requests from the development community. Indeed, ARB and OP are essential to allow users to process transactions from the Ethereum mainnet in a more convenient way.

The increase in activity on the networks is also evident from the increase in individual transactions. Arbitrum reports a passage from 670 thousand to 926 thousand daily transactions in the fourth quarter of 2023 alone, and for Optimism there is also talk of an increase of 20% in the same period.

As regards TVL, however, Arbitrum leads the ranking with 2.57 billion dollars, followed by Optimism with $937 million.