What is a Bridge?

As the number of blockchain networks, protocols, and utilities grow, it is also increasingly necessary to be able to move assets between different networks. However, since each blockchain is independent from the others, and many have their own language, this interaction is not given in such a simple way. For a while, exchanges were used to solve this problem, but that method involved paying various fees, going through many steps, and using centralized services. That is why bridges appeared, which are literally crypto tools that work as "bridges" that connect one network to another, to communicate them and thus be able to transfer information and assets between them.

Overview

This dashboard analyzes the activity of users that have bridged from Ethereum to Optimism during the past month. In order to evaluate if different time conditions affect the user activity, all the data is evaluated depending on the time span since the bridge transaction:

• Activity since the bridge transaction until now
• Activity on the first transaction after bridging

Key Findings

• There is a large variety of tokens that can be bridged from Ethereum to Optimism. However, the token that has been bridged the most is USDC with 904 transactions and 106.1M USD.
• USDT follows second, but it has close to 5 times less volume and bridge transactions.
• Seeing that the average stake size is 95.2k USD, the average size of deposits above the median is much higher (190.7k USD).
• The most active bridge user performed 60 bridge transactions over the past month, and the wallet with the highest volume bridged 19.7M USD.
• There is no user correlation between any of the top 10 wallets by number of bridge transactions and by amount bridged.
• The most common events for wallets that bridged from Ethereum to Optimism are Transfer, Swap and Approval.
• The most common destination after bridging an asset is Hop Protocol, by a large majority. Synthetix, Aave, Velodrome Finance and Uniswap follow as the other top destinations after bridging.

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• There was a spike in volume bridged on August 23rd, due to one wallet bridging 19.7M USDC.

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• Every user has on average 1.6 bridge transactions.

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• There is a large variety of tokens that can be bridged from Ethereum to Optimism. However, the token that has been bridged the most is USDC with 904 transactions and 106.1M USD.

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• USDT follows second, but it has close to 5 times less volume and bridge transactions.

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• The daily events and destinations charts show some volatility in the number of transactions over the past month, with high spikes forming at 3/4 day intervals.

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• The most common events for wallets that bridged from Ethereum to Optimism are Transfer, Swap and Approval. The first one is the most common event in both temporalities. However, Approval is more common for the first transaction after bridging, while the Swap event happens more often after some time has gone by since the bridging.

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• The most common destination after bridging an asset is Hop Protocol, by a large majority. Hop Protocol is a cross-chain bridge that aims to facilitate fast token transfers between different Layer 2 scaling solutions for Ethereum.

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• Synthetix, Aave, Velodrome Finance and Uniswap follow as the other top destinations after bridging.

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• We confirm that the clear majority of users go to Hop after bridging, as the most common activity type is ‘Layer 2’. Moreover, we know these are token transfers as the contract used in more than a 90% of the transactions is the token type contract.

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• The median provides a helpful measure of the centre of a dataset. In this case, we can see that on average during the past month, the median bridge size has been 4k USD. This means that there are as many bridge transactions above and below this number.

• However, seeing that the average stake size is 95.2k USD, we can confirm that the average size of deposits above the median is much higher (190.7k USD).

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• In the daily lowest deposits chart, August 26th had the highest value amongst all, of 85.7 USD. This value was much higher than any other value in that chart because that day did not have many bridge transactions, and all of them were higher than the aforementioned value.

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• Despite the lowest stake size ever being 3.76x10^-17 ETH, that was a rare scenario, as the average size of the minimum daily bridges is 12.44 USD.

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• The day that had the highest amount bridged in one transaction (19.7M USD) was also an unusual situation, as the average size of the maximum daily bridges is 2.56M USD.

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• The most active bridge user is 0x8594d8e9483473626908648a5539d9d65ca2fe8d, as it has used the bridge 60 times in the past month.

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• The wallet with the highest amount bridged is 0x6c788373151af0a8ee43d15c6ba2c787f38472ae, with 19.7M USD.

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• There is no user correlation between any of the top 10 wallets by number of bridge transactions and by amount bridged.

Conclusions

• There is a large variety of tokens that can be bridged from Ethereum to Optimism. However, the token that has been bridged the most is USDC with 904 transactions and 106.1M USD.
• USDT follows second, but it has close to 5 times less volume and bridge transactions.
• Seeing that the average stake size is 95.2k USD, the average size of deposits above the median is much higher (190.7k USD).
• The most active bridge user performed 60 bridge transactions over the past month, and the wallet with the highest volume bridged 19.7M USD.
• There is no user correlation between any of the top 10 wallets by number of bridge transactions and by amount bridged.
• The most common events for wallets that bridged from Ethereum to Optimism are Transfer, Swap and Approval.
• The most common destination after bridging an asset is Hop Protocol, by a large majority. Synthetix, Aave, Velodrome Finance and Uniswap follow as the other top destinations after bridging.

Methodology

The data used in this analysis was collected by combining the information on the ez_token_transfers, fact_event_logs and dim_labels tables of the core schema of the Ethereum and Optimism databases.

• The first table provided information about the bridge: volume, transactions, users and tokens transferred.
• The other two tables were required to display the most common events, destinations, activities and contract types of the wallets that bridged from Ethereum to Optimism.

Optimism Gateway Contract: 0x99c9fc46f92e8a1c0dec1b1747d010903e884be1