About Optimism

Optimism is a layer-two protocol built on top of the Ethereum network that offers “low-cost and lighting fast” transactions within the popular smart contracts blockchain ,Ethereum, to solve the scalability issues that have held back adoption in the past few years.

Optimism is an "Optimistic Rollup," which is basically just a fancy way of describing a blockchain that piggy-backs off of the security of another "parent" blockchain. Specifically, Optimistic Rollups take advantage of the consensus mechanism (like PoW or PoS) of their parent chain instead of providing their own. In Optimism's case this parent blockchain is Ethereum.

Instead of running all computation and data on the Ethereum network, Optimism puts all transaction data on-chain and runs computation off-chain, increasing Ethereum’s transactions per second and decreasing transaction fees. Since transaction data still stays on the Ethereum network, this scaling solution does not sacrifice Ethereum’s decentralisation or security for scalability. 

Methodology

In this dashboard, we will try to find the following parameters about Optimism to have a better understanding of its function and how it works.

1. Daily and cumulative amount of new wallets

2. Daily number of users

3. Transaction per second (TPS) per day

4. Daily transactions and successful transactions

5. Success rate per day and comparison of the succeed and failed transactions

6. Transaction fees per day

7. Number of swap transactions and users per day

8. New smart contracts per day

9. Most popular smart contracts

10. Most popular assets

11. Daily NFT transactions and users

12. Most popular NFT projects

    This dashboard covers the information since the past 90 days.

    
    \

Using the above charts, we see that the transaction per second, number of transactions, and users of Optimism have seen growth in July. The number of transactions and transactions per second peaked on July 29 at 269,594 transactions and 3.14 TPS. After the peak, the TPS and transactions decreased, but the success rate increased. Nevertheless, a hack on one of Optimism's Velodrome wallets on August 5 resulted in a sudden decrease in users and transactions for a while. Still, after a short time, they started to recover.

The transaction success rate of Optimism has been relatively consistent over time and has remained above 83% daily.

The success rate saw a minor dip on June 13 with about 83% and a top on June 27 with about 97%.

The total success rate of Optimism transactions is about 91%, whereas 9% of transactions have failed.

As of August 17, Optimism's average transaction success rate is without significant fluctuations and with average of 90%.

USDC is the most transacted asset on Optimism, with about 3M total transactions, followed by ETH with 2.25M and OP token with 1.75M.

Because USDC is a stablecoin, it makes sense that users would swap their risky assets to it during a bear market to minimize losses.

We first look at the total number of NFTs and the total Unique users of NFTs on Optimism. Next, we look at the number of NFTs traded daily. Each NFT Collection is identified by a distinct "NFT address" in Optimism Core's "NFT Sales" table. This is the actual contract address of the collection deployed on the Optimism Blockchain.

Finally, we will filter the Top 5 NFT projects according to the times they were traded on the marketplace.

Conclusion

According to all of the above metrics, the number of transactions and transactions per second on Optimism peaked on July 29. Despite a decline in activity during the end of June, it appears that there has been a recovery back to prior levels, which is a healthy development. On August 5, all activities across Optimism took a massive hit due to the hack, generating less than 10% of the numbers one day before. Although the hack, Optimism's activities started to recover in less than a week. This suggests that Optimism's users are devoted and confident in the project. In conclusion, although Optimism has suffered a significant decrease following the hack, it has been recovering. Therefore, it is reasonable to say that Optimism has been healthy during this bear market.