Ethereum layer-twos reportedly processing more transactions than Bitcoin

Published at: Sept. 7, 2021

Layer-two scaling protocols for Ethereum have surged in adoption in recent months as gas prices climb again, and the layer-two ecosystem is now processing more daily transactions than the Bitcoin network, according to recent findings.

According to CoinMetrics data collated by industry analyst and Week In Ethereum News founder Evan Van Ness, there were more transactions on Ethereum layer twos than on the Bitcoin network on Monday. Layer-two protocols processed around 250,000 transactions for the day, whereas there were around 210,000 on Bitcoin.

Fun fact:There are already more daily transactions on Ethereum's layer2 (~250k) than on Bitcoin (~210k yesterday per @coinmetrics) $ETH layer2 is just getting started

— Evan Van Ness (@evan_van_ness) September 6, 2021

The analyst revealed that StarkWare processed the most for the period with around 143,000 transactions across a number of decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms, such as the dYdX exchange and the layer-two nonfungible token platform Immutable X.

Arbitrum, which launched to mainnet on Wednesday, had around 56,000 transactions. Its newly launched Arbitrum One platform is already attracting big names in DeFi, including Aave, Chainlink and Uniswap, which is exploring several layer-two options.

Optimistic Ethereum had around 28,000 transactions for the day according to the researcher. Uniswap deployed its v3 protocol on Optimism in July, it also powers a layer two version of the Synthetix/Kwenta DeFi trading platform.

Van Ness reported that there were a few others comprising the rest, with decentralized exchange Loopring taking the lion’s share.

Bitcoiners pointed out that Van Ness has made a comparison of Ethereum layer twos with Bitcoin’s layer one and provided no information on Bitcoin’s layer-two Lightning Network. Van Ness responded that “my impression, given the low amount locked, is that Lightning has very little traction but I’m happy if someone shows me data to the contrary.”

Strategy lead at Ethereum layer-two technology aggregator Polygon “Sanket” broke down some of the statistics for the network, revealing that smaller transactions were dominant. In a tweet on Tuesday, he stated, “45% of all addresses, across all of their transactions that day, were less than $1.45.”

According to L2 Fees, Loopring remains the most cost-effective platform for transferring Ether (ETH) costing just $0.40 at the time of writing. Matter Labs’ zkSync was around double the cost at $0.83, while Arbitrum One cost $2.75, and Optimism was $5.83 to send ETH on their respective platforms.

Ether itself costs almost $11 for a simple ETH transfer, however, BitInfoCharts reported the average gas cost for all transaction types at around $40 yesterday.