Introduction

In this dashboard I will be looking into two bridges that users can use to transfer their assets to Optimism Mainnnet.

Optimism Gateway or Optimism Bridge is a bridge run by Optimism, by their own admission other bridges may be cheaper and faster than their bridge. However Optimism Bridge has a number of different tokens users can bridge, with Optimism having a well-run discord support server for those who may need help.

Hop allows users to transfer their assets across different layer 2 solutions, it has also very recently become a DAO of which holders of the Hop Protocol token can contribute to. The platform offers bridging between a number of different blockchains such as ETH, Polygon, Gnosis, Optimism and Arbitrum. Users can contribute to pools and stake on the platform offering the potential of passive income, Optimism Gateway lacks these features.

The average transaction of an investor using Hop has reached over 10 thousand on two occasions on May 13th which was before the launch of the Optimism token and Jun 13th post token launch. Average deposit size is often over 1000$ dollars with only 6 days where it has been under 1000$, showing that investors on the Hop bridge prefer not to make small transactions.

The Optimism bridges volume is much lower when compared to HOP, with volume more likely to be in the tens of thousands. They also experienced a peak of 2.33 million dollars in volume on the 1st of June following the launch of their blockchains token. Since then volume has lowered to the tens of thousands seen before the token launch. With the higher transaction fees investors may be using other bridges to get lower transaction fees.

Daily volume on Hop is often in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, with a peak of 4.73 million seen following the launch of the Optimism token on the 1st of June this year. The volume is often higher than on the Optimism Bridge, with volume more likely to be in the hundreds of thousands, whereas volume on the Optimism Bridge is more likely to be in the tens of thosands.

Interestingly despite the higher fees on the Optimism Gateway users are likely to make smaller transactions on average daily than on the Hop bridge. However, there is one day on the 2nd of June where the average transaction was at 57.36k over 3 times as high as the largest daily average transaction seen on Hop. On most days Optimism Gateway users are more likely to use the bridge to transfer sums under 1000 dollars.

Conclusion

Overall we can see that the investors that use Hop bridge are likely to send more on average to the Optimism Blockchain. Optimism Gateway has lower volume in addition to lower size of the average deposit. The lower volume could likely be explained by the higher transaction fee of the bridge when compared to some other bridges.

Methodologoy

I analysed the volume of ETH as it is on both bridges and the token is used for gas on the blockchain, meaning that first-time investors are likely to bridge the asset as well as investors who have used the blockchain a number of times. Optimism bridge(V2) and Optimism Gateway(V1) will be used interchangeably as both versions are included in the results for Optimism.

• For the chart Daily Volume to Optimism Hop, I analysed the sum of the transactions sent daily to the Optimism Hop bridge. I joined the daily results with the average price of ETH, and multiplied the results by the price of ETH to get the price in USD.

• For the chart Daily Volume to Optimism Gateway, I analysed the sum of the transactions sent daily to Optimism Gateway and joined this with the price of ETH. I joined the daily results with the average price of ETH, and multiplied the results by the price of ETH to get the price in USD.

• For the chart Average Transaction Hop, I analysed the average transaction size of a transaction sent to the Hop bridge using ETH. I joined the daily results with the average price of ETH, and multiplied the results by the price of ETH to get the price in USD.

• For the chart Average Transaction Optimism Gateway I analysed the average transaction size of a transaction sent to the Optimism Gateway using ETH. I joined the daily results with the average price of ETH, and multiplied the results by the price of ETH to get the price in USD.

• For the table Average Transaction To Optimism I analysed the average transaction size of a transaction sent to the Optimism Gateway and Hop using ETH. I joined the daily results with the average price of ETH, and multiplied the results by the price of ETH to get the price in USD. I then selected the average result over time to get the average transactions joining the Gateway and Hop results.

The average transaction on HOP at 4,789$ is 92% higher than the average transaction using the Optimism Gateway bridge. Showing that the profile of the investor that uses Hop in both ETH and USD is one of an investor looking to transfer more funds.

The Data

Let's take a look at how both Hop Exchange and Optimism Gateway are being used by investors.