📝 Editor's Note:

Welcome to OurNetwork's latest coverage of Layer 2s, the scaling solutions that typically resolve on Ethereum's mainnet.

This issue comes at a pivotal time — the crypto community is actively debating what roles Layer 2s should have relative to Ethereum's main chain. Critics argue that the scaling solutions have proved parasitic to mainnet, diverting revenue away from Ethereum and siloing liquidity. Proponents, however, say L2s have delivered on their promise to deliver secure and affordable scalability to the Ethereum ecosystem, with the expectation that ETH's price will follow these advancements.

OurNetwork's team of cracked analysts will get into the details below, starting with growthepie's overview of the L2 space. Hunter, Katerina, Surf Query, and Reza will follow, outlining the latest in onchain data across leading platforms — Arbitrum, Optimism, Abstract, and Blast.

On a chaotic week in global markets, let's get into it.

– ON Editorial Team

L2 Overview | Arbitrum | Optimism | Abstract | Blast

• Since 2023, Layer 2s (L2s) have seen rapid growth in weekly active addresses. Most of this growth comes from wallets used on a single L2. Wallets active on multiple L2s or cross-layer make up only ~5% in recent weeks. In 2023, single L2 usage was ~20% of Ethereum’s active addresses, now it’s near 80%. Growth has plateaued slightly since early this year, but is expected to rise again after Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade, which will increase blob capacity.

• L2s consume a lot of data. In the past 365 days, this has increased by over 17x monthly. Most of this growth has come from Eclipse, an L2 which consumes over 80% of the data posted to Celestia. Base, Coinbase's L2, is the largest consumer of Ethereum blobs, accounting for just under 40% of data posted.

• DeFi accounts for over 16% of transactions on L2s however, this has dropped to ~12% over the last 180 days due to an increase of MEV-related transactions. Using growthepie's application-level metrics, Uniswap remains the largest player out of all categories, with over 61M transactions in the past 90 days.

• Arbitrum One, a generalize-purpose L2, is the land of liquidity for the Arbitrum ecosystem. Known as the home of DeFi, it's rapidly becoming a hotspot for Real World Assets (RWAs) with the market cap recently passing $200M. Integrated RWA teams include the likes of Franklin Templeton, BlackRock, and —more recently— Wisdom Tree, as well as crypto-native projects like Mountain Protocol, Estate Protocol, and Spiko.

• Arbitrum One has 19 of stablecoins with above $1M of total value locked (TVL) onchain — that's second only to Ethereum. More recent stablecoins include the state of Wyoming's stablecoin, WYST on Arbitrum Sepolia, a testnet. Bitso, an exchange, also launched the Mexican peso-pegged MXN on Arbitrum One.

• Ostium, an Arbitrum project that allows users to long or short forex, stock indices, commodities, & crypto from your wallet, has seen massive growth in users, TVL, and volume over the past month.

• Optimism is an L2 whose vision is to build an equitable and fair internet. Last year, OP announced that it will reduce liquidity fragmentation by making it easier for L2s building on its technology — like Base, Zora, and WorldChain— to exchange data with each other. To date, Optimism has $3.17B total onchain value. There was a sharp decline in revenue from over $6M to $2M after the Dencun upgrade —the one which deployed blobs— in March 2024. The upgrade optimized data storage on Ethereum and slashed fees for Optimism and its chains.

• To increase revenue after the Dencun upgrade, Optimism needs to get more accounts to execute more transactions. Since July 2024, we are seeing a larger growth in transactions executed (95%) than unique accounts operating (-25%). Accounts in this context means smart contract addresses.

• The reason for the larger growth in transactions compared to accounts could be the rise of bots. More than a third of transactions are mapped to 'likely DEX trade bot (40.3%).' Beyond that, transactions are attributed to specific more popular bots. For example, Sigma, a bot, generates 6.5% of transactions on Base.

• Abstract Chain is an L2 blockchain built on ZkSync's Elastic stack, designed for consumer-friendly apps. Its main feature is the Abstract Global Wallet (AGW) — a smart contract wallet that uses account abstraction to simplify how users interact with dapps. Since the mainnet launch, more than 1.6M AGWs have been deployed, carrying out almost 29M account abstracted (AA) transactions.

• Session keys in AGWs enable pre-approved actions without user signatures, allowing seamless, click-free transactions for a smoother dApp experience. To date, they’ve powered nearly 8M transactions and over $28M in volume across 88 dApps and token combinations—no user approvals needed.

• Myriad Markets, the leading dapp using AGW's Session Keys, blends prediction markets with media content. Since launch, it has created 308 markets, processed 3.7M transactions, and served 382k traders. In its first month, 49 USDC markets saw more than $1.6M in volume from 13.7k traders and 95k trades

• Blast, the first L2 with native yield —meaning users could generate yield just by holding ETH in their wallets— had its token generation event (TGE) in June 2024. Declining user growth and decreased satisfaction followed. In response, Blast launched its mobile platform in January 2025, offering a yield of over 50% APY —currently at ~80%— on Blast-launched stablecoin USDB. This move, combined with integrating the popular Fantasy Top app, led Blast to achieve its first major post-TGE growth, hitting a 421.7% increase in new addresses and a 57.54% rise in monthly transactions in March 2025.

• After Blast’s TGE, DeFi TVL dropped ~85%. Despite hopes that USDB yields above 50% post-app launch could recover losses, DeFi TVL fell another 55.2%. Even overall TVL declined 59.4%, highlighting persistent challenges despite strategic pivots.

• The current TVL in Blast mobile app’s Earn section is ~$48M, offering up to 80% APY for locking BLAST token and USDB. Growth appears strong, and is up 37% in early April vs. early February, but momentum stalled through March and hasn't yet shown notable improvement in April.