Optimistic rollups by the numbers

In the past six months, Optimistic rollups (ORUs) have seen significant growth in adoption, especially for Arbitrum and Optimism. Optimism mainnet was launched on June 22 this year, while Arbitrum mainnet went live on May 28. That said, Optimism has been operational for staking Synthetix tokens since January 2021. A quick comparison of Arbitrum’s and Optimism’s TVL would indicate that Arbitrum has outperformed Optimism in terms of attracting liquidity and users. 

This research piece will cover some of the commonly raised topics regarding the development of these two protocols, namely the rate of onboarding dapps and the speculation behind a governance token, before taking a closer look at the statistics on the growth and user adoption of both projects to provide a data-backed basis for comparison.