Optimism renamed to OP Mainnet: Examining the implications

• Optimism’s single-round fraud-proof left it at a disadvantage compared to Arbitrum.
• OP’s development activity fared better, but the TVL remained in ARB’s favor.

Layer Two (L2) scaling solution Optimism [OP] has announced a name change. According to the foundation’s official Twitter page, the chain is now called “OP Mainnet.”

Realistic or not, here’s OP’s market cap in ARB terms

Although there was no prior public knowledge of the action, Optimism noted the motivation behind the decision was to create a “Superchain.”

Is the “Superchain” key to lost regions?

This super chain would allow the project to seamlessly communicate with other chains. One chain that Optimism mentioned as involved was Coinbase’s open-source Ethereum [ETH] L2 Base.

Since launch, Optimism has maintained its stay as part of the top two Ethereum L2s. However, Arbitrum [ARB], which uses multi-round fraud proofs, has been outpacing its opposite number. 

A key reason for this is Optimism’s use of single-round fraud proofs, which makes the network more expensive despite being faster.

As a result of Arbitrum’s cheaper nature, the daily active addresses on the chain surpassed that of Optimism. At press time, Artemis’ data showed that Optimism’s daily active addresses were 88,560.

On the other hand, the crypto analytics tracker revealed that Arbitrum was ahead with the metric at 161,830.

Source: Artemis

This condition implied that Arnbitrum was processing more transactions at press time, while Optimism’s reception has been relatively half-hearted.

Development for OP, TVL for ARB

When it comes to their respective development activity, OP was on top of the podium at press time. While both projects seem to have a similar trend in this metric, OP’s development activity was 29.29. 

Arbitrum, which had a recent decrease like Optimism, had its development activity at 17.12. Therefore, this shows that Optimism attracted more public GitHub repositories than Arbitrum. 

This comes as a surprise, especially as Arbitrum’s fault-proof conduct and EVM compatibility override that of Optimism. 

Source: Santiment

Another aspect of the optimistic rollups that have become an area of interest is Total Value Locked (TVL). By definition, the TVL represented the worth of assets deposited by liquidity providers and locked in DeFi protocols. 

Interestingly, there is a notable difference between Arbitrum and Optimsm’s operation. 

While Optimism’s TVL is largely dependent on DEXes and derivatives protocol, Arbitrum seems more evenly spread among the aforementioned two, yield projects, cross-chain, and lending protocols.

Due to this, Arbtirum’s TVL was worth $2.19 billion at the time of writing. Conversely, Optimism TVL was less at $804.55 million.

Source: DefiLlama

How much are 1,10,100 OPs worth today?

As it stands at press time, Optimism still played second-fiddle to Arbitrum. However, one cannot conclude that the project is down and out of the race. 

It has also experienced key growth and a deciding factor of how far the new name would impact the ecosystem is its integration with the Base chain.