January Layer 2 Landscape Recap

As the crypto markets experienced significant volatility in January, there was a noticeable uptick in some rollups' ecosystems. This was especially evident for Optimism, which also saw significant price action for its governance token, OP. The speculation on Optimism was likely caused by Optimism quests, which was covered in an earlier research piece. This speculation also spilled over to Arbitrum towards the second half of January. 

Optimism saw a significant spike in on-chain activity during the first two weeks of January, where daily transactions peaked at 760,000. Optimism also saw a surge in daily users, with an average of 59,000 daily users. While the run-up was a boost for the Optimism ecosystem, it was relatively short-lived. These numbers quickly declined in the second half of January, and Arbitrum seemed to have captured some of this traffic which had fallen off.