Optimism: Inflows and Outflows
What is the volume of ETH and a stablecoin of your choice that's moved between the Optimism network and the Ethereum network across the bridge? How has that changed over time?
Introduction
This dashboard comes in two parts: firstly, we will look into the inflows to the Optimism Bridge, by investigating how many transactions and how much USD is being bridged to Optimism from Ethereum. Secondly, we will look into the outflows from the Bridge, when users leave Optimism and go back to Ethereum.
Methodology
The calculation of the inflows was quite straightforward. Using the
ethereum.core.ez_token_transfers
table as well as the
ethereum.core.ez_eth_transfers
, it was just a matter of getting the right addresses for the tokens. I have decided to look into ETH and USDC/USDT for the stablecoins.
The outflows were a little bit more thought-inducting, as I had to consider the addresses on both the Optimism side and the Ethereum side, and then join the hourly token prices
to get the USD volume for the outflows.
The data is set to refresh daily and consists of days from the beginning of May 2022.
We can see that users join the Optimistic ecosystem mostly with USDC, when it comes to the volume transacted. There are some major spikes in popularity of the bridge, especially on the 5th of August where over $80M of USDC was bridged. However, when we look at the number of transactions, we can see that it is ETH that constitutes of the biggest number of executed transactions. What does this imply? Looking at both of these metrics we can see that USDC is being bridged in larger sums on average than ETH, which signifies the presence of whales who bridge USDC and not ETH.
The outflows from the OP Bridge back to Ethereum show us that users are more keen to withdraw ETH than the stablecoins. We can see ETH being the most popular asset when it comes to both the number of transactions and the USD volume. What could this imply, when it comes to what we established based off the inflows? It looks like a lot os users could be depositing USDC into the Optimism’s ecosystem and then swapping it for ETH using the DeFi platforms found on Optimism, and then bridging it back to Ethereum. Why could this be the case? It could be caused by better rewards found on Optimism, for example for staking ETH than staking ETH on Ethereum - however there are definitely more reasons and valuable platforms on Optimism that draw users from the Ethereum network in the first place.
Conclusion
We have seen how the situation is looking like for the Optimism Bridge in the past few months. We have discovered what volumes of ETH and two stablecoins, namely USDC and USDT have been for both the inflows and the outflows to/from the OP Bridge.
We have to keep in mind that bridging into Optimism is fast and easy, whereas withdrawing from Optimism back to Ethereum is more time-consuming, as using the native bridge could take up to 7 days - which implies that users might be keener to use other bridges, such as Hop Protocol or Stargate, which only take about 20 minutes to complete.
- Dashboard by -pine-nat-#4310
- Twitter:
- Refresh Rate - Daily
- Data from FlipsideCrypto