Arbitrum | Base | World Chain | zkSync | Taiko

• At growthepie, we provide curated analytics on Layer 2 activity and economics. We also offer in-depth insights into user behavior, with over 80% of Layer 2 transactions categorized. Layer 2s have shown impressive growth, reaching ~9.5M distinct weekly active addresses. In contrast, activity on multiple Layer 2s has decreased by more than 30% over the last six months, falling to ~600K addresses. This suggests Layer 2s are able to grow their userbases independently of each other.

• As Layer 2 transaction costs decreased, daily revenues dropped from a high of ~$4.5M to a low of ~$75K, with recent revenues gradually rising towards ~$300K. This could indicate inelastic demand, but other factors such as the time it takes to develop applications are also a lagging factor.

• Analyzing onchain activity, DeFi had the largest share of gas fees in the past six months at 27.5%, followed by CeFi, which growthepie categorizes as maximal extractable value, CEX, and trading, at 16.6%. This month however, CeFi hit 22.4% of gas fees, surpassing DeFi's 21.4%. This indicates increased capital expenditure in capturing MEV.

• Since launch, Arbitrum One, the leading Layer 2 by value locked, has led onchain stablecoin supply. — the Layer 2 recently passed the $4B mark of stablecoin liquidity, which is available for DeFi, consumer projects, and chains on Arbitrum One.

• Year to date, Arbitrum One leads in net onchain liquidity flows sitting at $2.5B, allowing for liquidity to be passed onto the teams building in the ecosystem alongside Orbit chains, blockchains which can be permissionlessly launched using Arbitrum's infrastructure.

• Arbitrum Orbit chain activity leads in MegaGas per Second, a metric which shows the amount of computational work a chain is doing — the metric sits at 47.01 (64.24% of all "stacks," which include the Optimism Layer 2 tech stack) with TPS sitting at 146.60 (53.10% of all stacks).

• Despite launching a little over a year ago in August 2023, Base has already garnered a substantial userbase, with Q3 2024 topping out at 47.2M unique users.

• Stablecoin usage on Base has exploded, which coincides with the substantial growth in users in the past year. On Oct. 26, Base led all other blockchains for the first time in terms of stablecoin transfer volume.

• Daily Base network revenue, measured by the value of gas fees collected, hit an all time high of $2.39M on Mar. 26 this year. Revenue has since cooled, despite the increase in usage. The cooling has happened because of Ethereum's Dencun upgrade, which happened in March and dramatically reduced the amount of fees Layer 2s charged.

• World Chain is a Layer 2 designed for individual humans as opposed to blockchain addresses. World App is the key app built on top of World Chain which uses Safes (non-custodial and smart accounts with multi-sig and account abstraction) to safely store an ID (called "World ID"), exchange digital assets, and access Mini Apps. To date, 14.3M users have been verified with a World ID and are primarily represented by Safes to transact on the World Chain. Wallet types on World Chain show that over 95% of these wallets are Safes, while 5% are just externally owned accounts, which are traditional crypto addresses controlled by a users private key as opposed to a smart contract.

• Safe usage on World Chain remains steady, averaging 525K daily Safe transactions with almost 10M Safe transactions to date. Safe's daily retention rates on World Chain of between 5%-10% are healthy overall and continue to improve for newer user cohorts joining World Chain.

• To date, World Chain has facilitated over $700M in transfer volumes within 10 days since the chain launched. The associated token, Worldcoin (WRLD), was the biggest asset transferred, and accounted for over half of the overall volume on World Chain, followed by WETH, a more easily tradable form of ETH. Trading over the past 7 days shows WLD especially dominating in terms of volume.

• ZKsync is an Ethereum scaling solution that has evolved from a single Layer 2 rollup into an ecosystem of interconnected rollups called the "Elastic Chain," which aims to solve liquidity fragmentation and user experience issues through native interoperability. QuarkID's decentralized digital identity (DID) solution has generated over 100,000 decentralized identifiers since its public launch on Oct. 22, 2024. Each DID leverages ZKsync Era as its security anchor, establishing onchain provenance for data creation timestamps.

• DeFi on ZKsync Era is picking up as Aave, Kelp, and Venus, all of which offer lending functionality, break into the top 10 protocols by total value locked. Since September, these three protocols have grown to a combined ~$50M in TVL, including borrows.

• Cronos zkEVM is a general-purpose Validium, a zero-knowledge enabled rollup, built to scale the existing portfolio of Cronos apps and chains which launched to public mainnet on Aug. 15, 2024. Since then, it has grown to nearly $50M in TVL. Cronos zkEVM is the second ZK Chain to launch to mainnet on the Elastic Chain, a tech stack for rollups developed by ZKsync.

• Taiko, the first based rollup —where transaction sequencing is done by Ethereum validators vs. centralized sequencers— is witnessing impressive growth in network activity. Over the last 30 days, Taiko boasted over 60M+ transactions, the second most transactions among all rollups —only behind Base— according to growthepie. Over the last 30 days, Taiko had more than 642K distinct active addresses, a 181% increase from 3 months prior.

• Taiko is demonstrating based rollups can be profitable. The rollup recorded the second largest onchain profit over the last 7 days of all rollups, netting $150k.

• Over the last 30 days, token transfers, social, and DeFi accounted for the majority of Taiko blockspace usage (46%, 26%, and 10%, respectively). Removing token transfers, RubyScore, and iZumi Finance were the top contracts by gas spent.