QUESTIONS BOUNTY

• What is the volume of ETH and three stablecoins of your choice that's moved between the Optimism network and the Ethereum network across the bridge?
• How has that changed over time? Note any interesting trends or outliers that you see.

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What Is Optimism (OP)?

Optimism (OP) is a layer-two blockchain on top of Ethereum. Optimism benefits from the security of the Ethereum mainnet and helps scale the Ethereum ecosystem by using optimistic rollups. That means transactions are trustlessly recorded on Optimism but ultimately secured on Ethereum.

Optimism is one of the biggest scaling solutions for Ethereum with over $300 million in TVL. It is home to 35 protocols, the biggest being Synthetix (SNX), a derivatives exchange, Uniswap (UNI), a DEX, and Velodrome (VELO), an AMM. Users can begin their journey on Optimism by adding the chain on their Metamask and bridging tokens like ETH to the L2. On May 31, 2022, Optimism conducted a highly anticipated airdrop of its OP token. The airdrop was so popular that it briefly slowed down the Optimism blockchain.

What Makes Optimism Unique?

Optimism is designed around four core tenets:

• Simplicity
• Pragmatism
• Sustainability
• Optimism

Optimism aims for the minimum number of moving parts while building a layer-two solution for Ethereum. In practice, this means using proven Ethereum code and infrastructure when possible. Optimism thus aims to keep its code as simple as possible and work directly with existing codebases.

The ecosystem further emphasizes pragmatism and is driven by the real-world needs and constraints of its own team and the users engaging with the ecosystem. Hence, Optimism aims to build iteratively and implement features like EVM equivalence gradually.

Optimism's design process is built around the idea of long-term sustainability and not taking shortcuts to scalability. That is why it uses optimistic rollups and takes advantage of the consensus mechanism of Ethereum to scale the network. Blocks are constructed and executed on the L2 (Optimism), while user transactions are batched up and submitted to the L1 (Ethereum). The L2 has no mempool, and transactions are immediately accepted or rejected. This guarantees a smooth user experience while ensuring security through the Ethereum consensus mechanism.

Transactions are submitted to Ethereum without direct proof of validity and can be challenged for a certain period of time (currently seven days). After that, a transaction is considered final. That is why withdrawals from Optimism to Ethereum take seven days to complete.

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==CONCLUSIONS==

• The USD total Volume of Bridges from Ethereum To Optimism is much higher than Optimism to Mainnet
• also, the number of bridge transactions for ETH with 212K is much higher than the others
• USDC with $931M is the top Asset user Bridged to Optimism in terms of USD volume, the second one is ETH with $862M

OBSERVATIONS

• this cumulative chart show how the Volume changed over time.
• USDC and ETH have the biggest growth
• in April 2022, the USDC volume spiked and started to increase heavily, and could go above the ETH in July 2022

on August 4th, 2022 Aave Announced that the Liquidity Mining program is live on Aave V3 The program will run for 90 days with a distribution of 5M OP to the Aave Protocol’s Optimism Market users. this caused a big jump in Bridge Volume.

OBSERVATIONS

• the number of bridges from Optimism to Mainnet is much low compare to Mainnet to Optimism
• in September 2021, the ETH bridge had a big spike and had 55K bridges only in one month
• ETH has much higher bridges and is not comparable with the others, as of today 212K bridges occurred for ETH and the USDC with 12K is in the second place

OBSERVATIONS

• the number of bridges to Ethereum is too low and in the last months, there were under 100 wallets each month
• in September and October 2021, a huge number of wallets bridged to Optimism, but this trend declined and in the last months there were between 5K-10K, and most of them bridged ETH

SPECIAL THANKS

Finally, I wanted to thank my colleague misaghlb for helping me to make this bounty and to get all this information.

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FINAL CONCLUSIONS

• The USD total Volume of Bridges from Ethereum To Optimism is much higher than Optimism to Mainnet
• also, the number of bridge transactions for ETH with 212K is much higher than the others
• USDC with $931M is the top Asset user Bridged to Optimism in terms of USD volume, the second one is ETH with $862M
• for bridges from Optimism to Mainnet again the USDC has the highest USD volume with $449M, this number for ETH is $228M
• these cumulative charts show how the Volume changed over time
• in April 2022, the USDC volume spiked and started to increase heavily, and could go above the ETH in July 2022
• the main assets for Bridge to Optimism and Ethereum are USDC and ETH
• ETH has much higher bridges and is not comparable with the others, as of today 212K bridges occurred for ETH and the USDC with 12K is in the second place
• in the last months, there were between 5K-10K bridgers to Optimism, and most of them bridged ETH