Worldcoin Boosts Daily Transactions on Optimism, Overtaking Arbitrum

Daily transactions on the Optimism layer-2 network have surpassed Arbitrum for the first time in six months, fueled by Worldcoin's influence.

Thanks to Worldcoin, daily transactions on Optimism surpass Arbitrum

According to data from Blockworks Research's Dune Analytics dashboard, daily transactions on the OP Mainnet (Optimism) reached 844,290 tx on July 26, exceeding Arbitrum's 630,534 tx.

This marks the first time in half a year that Optimism activity has been able to dominate Arbitrum.

Daily transaction statistics on Arbitrum (blue) and Optimism (red). Source: Blockworks Research on Dune Analytics

CoinDesk attributes this growth to the global launch event of Worldcoin—a cryptocurrency project that identifies users by scanning retinas and airdrops WLD tokens.

Initially launched on Arbitrum, Worldcoin announced in early July that it had migrated its entire platform to Optimism.

Despite a grandiose launch event and significant publicity, blockchain data indicates that the WLD token is currently held in only approximately 250,000 on-chain wallets. This statistic excludes tokens transferred to centralized exchanges (CEX).

Other concerns surrounding Worldcoin stem from potential user information security issues and conspiracy theories alleging that Worldcoin is artificially maintaining token prices to achieve a high diluted market capitalization (FDV) by circulating only a small portion of tokens, with the rest held by market makers and the development team.

Statistics on Worldcoin (WLD) as of noon on July 28, 2023. Source: CoinMarketCap

Despite launching later than Arbitrum and currently having less than half the Total Value Locked (TVL) at $2.82 billion compared to $5.97 billion, Optimism has seen noteworthy developments throughout 2023. These include rebranding to OP Mainnet to reflect the vision of building a Superchain, increasing ETH utility for fee payments, upgrading Bedrock to reduce fees, popularizing the OP Stack layer-2 development toolkit, and collaborating with major projects such as Coinbase's Base, Zora Network by Zora, and most recently, Worldcoin.

Statistics of the top 10 layer-2 networks with the largest TVL on Ethereum, captured on L2Beat at 11:20 AM on July 28, 2023.