Introduction

What is bridging?

Optimism is a layer2 network on top of the Ethereum blockchain, but it is also essentially a separate blockchain. Users must transfer their assets and data to work with both blockchains. The process of transferring assets and data between two networks is called “bridging”.

Standard Token Bridge

Optimism has launched a platform called Standard Token Bridge to move tokens. Standard Token Bridge is a simple smart contract with all the functionality you need to transfer tokens between Optimism and Ethereum. It also allows you to create an L2 representation of existing tokens on Ethereum easily.

Dashboard’s Goal

The purpose of this dashboard is to analyze the standard token bridge and compare it with a bridge like HOP.

Source image

Methodology

In order to obtain the data of the standard bridge, Ethereum schema, and tables ez_eth_transfers, ez_token_transfers, and dim_labels have been used.

The standard bridge smart contract is:

0x99c9fc46f92e8a1c0dec1b1747d010903e884be1

which is used to get data related to incoming transactions to the bridge. Also, in the tabledim_labels, by applying the following conditions:

label_type = 'layer2' 
and LABEL_SUBTYPE = 'bridge' 
and LABEL = 'hop protocol'

The smart contracts relating to Hope Bridge can be obtained.

This dashboard consists of two main parts. In the first part, which is related to the optimism standard bridge, we try to answer the following questions:

• Where are assets coming from?
• Where are they going?
• and how are they used?

And in the second part, by exploring the data related to the Hop Bridge, we try to compare this platform with the Optimism standard bridge.

Image source

Analysis

Hop Protocol

To Optimism Standard Bridge

From Optimism Standard Bridge

🔭 Insights:

Fig 1 & 2

• The number of incoming transactions to the standard bridge has been accompanied by two upward trends. One from the beginning of August 2021 to the end of October 2021, after which it entered a downward trend for several months and this trend continued until March 2022. The next upward trend started from April and continued until July.
• The highest number of transactions is related to October 2021.
• Most of the inputs to the standard bridge came from the Coinbase exchange, which accounts for 81.3% of the transactions.
• Across protocol is in the second place with 11.7% of transactions,
• And the Idex decentralized exchange is in the third place with 5.79% of transactions.

🔭 Insights:

Fig 3 & 4

In terms of equivalent amount of USD input to the bridge:

• The months of July, August and February have the largest amount of input.
• Here too, we faced two upward trends, the maximum volume of the first trend occurred in February with a volume of around 12M USD, and this number was touched in the second trend as well.
• Coinbase is in the first place with 58.8% of the total input volume to the bridge, followed by Across Protocol with 27.8% and Gnosis with 13.1%, respectively.

🔭 Insights:

Fig 8 & 9

• The months of December 2021 and January, May and June 2022 have the most transactions.
• The destination of most transactions is the Coinbase exchange, and Across protocol is in the second place.
• In October, Set protocol accounted for 25% of transactions.

🔭 Insights:

Fig 10 & 11

If we want to examine the destinations in terms of volume:

• The largest volume is related to Across protocol, which has a significant volume from December 2021 to June 2022.
• 83.1% of the volume has been transferred to Across protocol and Coinbase is ranked second with 13.4%.

🔭 Insights: ==Fig 12 & 13

In terms of volume for each token:

• The largest volume is related to the USDC token with 84.8% of the total volume, a high percentage of which has been transferred to the Across protocol.
• ETH ranks second with 4.86% and LINK ranks third with 3.93%.
• The largest volume was transferred in May and about 12M USD.

🔭 Insights: ==Fig 10

The most used events after the bridge are shown in figure 14.

• Transfer with 48.1% of all transactions is in the first place, Approval with 17.7% and Deposit with 10.1% are in the second and third places, respectively.
• Swap also has a share of 8.5%.

🔭 Insights: ==Fig 15

• Most of the transactions after the bridge have entered the Hop protocol, which accounts for 45.5% of the transactions.
• In the second place, some platforms either have empty address_name or have a small share.
• The Optimism platform ranks third with 19.7% and Synthetics ranks fourth with 5%.

🔭 Insights:

Fig 16 & 17

In general, the Hope protocol has a better position than the standard bridge in terms of the number of transactions and has more transactions. But here too, most of the transactions originate from Coinbase. In Hop protocol, like Standard Bridge, in recent months, Gnosis has grown significantly.

🔭 Insights:

Fig 18 & 19

In terms of USD volume, The largest volume of input to the Hop is related to the Hop protocol: eth bonder with 39.8%. Then Coinbase is ranked with 21.9% and the third place is Hop Protocol: usdc bonder with 15.5%.

A total of 1,652 transactions from Coinbase have been entered into Hop Bridge, which is a higher number compared to the standard bridge. The remarkable thing is the high growth of Gnosis in recent months.

🔭 Insights: ==Fig 20, 21 & 22

• From July 2021 to January 2022, the volume of incoming tokens to Hop Bridge has grown so much that it reached more than 150M USD in January.
• As it is clear from Fig 20, the volume of tokens is several times compared to standard bridge.
• Unlike the standard bridge, the largest volume of tokens entered into Hop bridge is the ETH token, which accounts for 60.3%. USDC is ranked second.
• As it is clear from Figure 22, in terms of the number of transactions, the ETH token ranks first by a large margin.

🔭 Insights: ==Fig 5, 6 & 7:

Fig 5 shows the USD equivalent volume of each token on a monthly basis to the standard bridge.

• In most months, ETH accounts for the most significant volume, but the USDC token has grown significantly in the last few months and has taken the place of ETH.
• In January, February, and September, the PERP token was entered into the standard bridge equal to 14M USD.
• In general, the most significant volume of input is related to USDC with 42.6%. Ethereum and PERP are also in second and third place.
• As you can see in Figure 7, from June to September, USDC and PERP tokens entered the standard bridge with low transaction frequency but high volume.

Conclusions

• 81.3% of incoming transactions to Standard Bridge originate from Coinbase.
• 58.8% of the input volume to the standard bridge is related to Coinbase, 27.8% is related to Across Protocol and 13.1% is related to Gnosis.
• The USDC token has the most significant volume of input to Standard Bridge.
• The destination of most outgoing transactions from Bridge Standard is Coinbase, but in terms of outgoing volume, 83.1% of it is related to the Across protocol.
• The destination of 45.5% of users after Bridge Standard is the Hop protocol.
• Hop bridge is higher than the standard bridge in terms of volume and number of transactions.
• Unlike the standard bridge, the most outgoing token from the Hop bridge is the ETH token.

Contact me

Thank you for being with me so far in this analysis. If you have any questions, you can ask through the following ways. I will be pleased to answer the questions.

Discord: mr_nobody73#9620

Twitter: Mr_Nobody73

In all parts, the data has been analyzed monthly.