Introduction

Continuing our investigation into Hop exchange and other L2 that it supports, we are going to track some Whale stats, along with some more comparisons between Hop and Arbitrum, Optimism and Polygon's Native Bridges. It is interesting to know how popular are DEXs comparing to native bridges, based on the overall condition of market and different products & services and opportunities each one provides.

Hop exchange is probably among top 3 exchanges that provide routes from Ethereum layer 1 and other networks to Layer 2 chains. It already in a position that aggregators and smaller bridges are using its contracts to provide their own product and services. So, the question is whether Hop been able to surpass L2's native bridges in some metrics? We'll See...

Methodology

What are we investigating?

• How many whales used Hop exchange for each L2? How many for their native bridges? and how much were they bridging?
• How many unique users each chain has totally and Weekly? For Hop & Native bridges...
• How Many transaction are occurring on each chain? For Hop & Native bridges...
• And how much is the daily average amount bridges in past 60 days? Again for Hop and Bridges

Most Metrics are divided by the assets in use, meaning that ETH is mostly has been separated from Stable Coins or Other coins.

You should pay attention to the title of each table or chart to compare them correctly

Data & Analysis

Let us begin with Whale Stats. I defined Whales with having more than 1000000$ Bridged.

• There are 85 Unique whales using Hop to Bridge to L2s, and Arbitrum has most whales with most ETH bridged amount.
• Almost 60% of ETH bridged from L1 to L2 through Hop is to Arbitrum and that's almost 150 Million dollars
• Arbitrum also has 52 Whales according to our definition.

Now Comparing same Metrics for their native bridge

• The real difference comes from Polygon native bridge were it has a much greater popularity among whales
• Of 1766 Whales, 1657 had transactions with Polygon Native bridge.
• Arbitrum Native bridge almost 2.5X better than Hop. This also true about Optimism So we can say Native bridges are more popular between Whales.

Now taking the analysis to the realm of stable coins, investigating into same metrics again

• Same order is present in terms of Arbitrum Popularity over Optimism and Polygon but the deficit is much less now.
• The same is true about the preference of native bridges over Hop in all cases (Although this might differ if queried daily for example)

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Next Round of Metrics inquire the Hop and Native Bridge's unique users, the frequency of use and Weekly unique users. I will compare them one by one respectively for Hop and other L2s.

First Let's take a look at total unique users for each chain on Hop and compare it to unique users of each native bridge:

• What we have seen for whales seems to be true for entire user base as arbitrum has the most unique users through Hop and Optimism, Polygon and xDAI come after it.
• But There is a difference in that Unique users of Arbitrum are fewer than Hop Arbitrum users and this is a great achievement for Hop!
• Polygon again has much more users from native bridge than through Hop.

On a weekly basis there was a Polygon dominance in Q4 2021 since fees were high for Ethereum but this scene has changed to a more competitive battle where arbitrum was #1 in most weeks. But the lead definitely changed case to case based on projects status. recently more unique users are coming to arbitrum through Hop since odyssey campaign just started.

Some insight on frequency of use:

• Weekly transactions of bridging into Polygon decreased over time
• While Arbitrum and Optimism experienced slight and steady growth, there are some spikes for each, which is related to OP launch and latest arbitrum campaign.
• xDAI has much lesser Usage in Hop
• while Polygon native bridge Frequency of use decreased over the past month, Optimism native bridge had a great 2 month in September and October 2021

I will end this long analysis by two charts of daily average ETH and Non-ETH assets bridged through Hop and native bridges in past 60 days. Beside from spikes, you can see that Hop never managed to take #1 spot. Also when the bridged asset is ETH, Optimism have most spikes, while other assets have more average in arbitrum and Polygon.