Starknet has the most active developers of any Layer 2 (515 people). This article originates from SPENCER NOON’s article, compiled and written by Shenchao TechFlow.
(Recap: The total locked-up value of Ethereum Layer 2 has exceeded US$12 billion, a “new high”. Is L2 token taking off?)
(Background supplement:Layer 2 is heating up. Is L2 competition entering the “melee stage”? Consensys zkSync launches Fellowship program )
Polygon zkEVM
Polygon’s CDK stack: Usage grew approximately 2x in the past 30 days.
Polygon zkEVM is built on the Chain Development Kit (CDK), an open source, modular set of components for launching custom blockchains within the Polygon and Ethereum ecosystems. Polygon zkEVM (built on CDK) continues to grow in terms of active wallets, transactions, and TVL. Compared to the previous 30 days, the seven-day moving average of active wallets and transactions increased by 105% and 83% respectively. Its TVL grew 14% over a similar period. As of November 8, Polygon’s zkEVM had 15,500 active wallets and 56,800 transactions per day.
Polygon zkEVM In the 24 hours after withdrawals were launched on Polygon zkEVM, 14,000 wallets completed 39,000 withdrawals of at least 101 different coins. Since July 20, the number of withdrawals completed within 24 hours has increased significantly, making Polygon zkEVM one of the fastest native cross-chain bridges.
Further reading: What is Polygon zkEVM?An article taking stock of the ecology and potential projects on the chain
Chains stacked using CDK include Astar, Canto, Near and Palm. Overall, these chains (including Polygon zkEVM) have nearly 11 million active wallets and 452 million transactions since 2022. They bring approximately $162 million in TVL to the CDK ecosystem.
Tx-Level Alpha: 35 minutes. This is the time it took for the wallet to claim 105.77 ETH (worth $224,000) from Polygon zkEVM to Ethereum via the Polygon zkEVM native cross-chain bridge. Polygon’s CDK feature allows withdrawals to be completed almost instantly, making Polygon zkEVM one of the fastest native cross-chain bridges for transferring funds from L2 to Ethereum.
Scroll
The Scroll mainnet accumulated more than $36 million in TVL, more than 3 million transactions and 1 million addresses in 3 weeks.
Scroll is a native, community-first zkEVM built on Ethereum, designed to be extensible without sacrificing security, developer or user experience. Scroll officially announced the mainnet launch on October 17, 2023, and has grown rapidly since then. The total locked value of the bridge has exceeded $36 million, with about half of that in DeFi protocols (this will likely increase as more projects are indexed). Both transaction and independent addresses showed a clear growth trend, exceeding 3 million and 1 million respectively.
Since the genesis block, the average daily gas fee has dropped by 84%. For the initial stage of zkEVM, transaction costs actually dropped significantly (and stabilized) as the number of users and transactions increased; this was due to the fixed attestation cost being amortized over a larger group of users.
To celebrate mainnet, Scroll announced Scroll Origins NFTs on October 26 for use by early smart contract deployers after the genesis block. The campaign has successfully increased deployments on Scroll, with the average number of contracts verified per day increasing by 92% since the announcement (around 1,000 per day over the past few days).
Tx-Level Alpha: This is the creation transaction of the L2ScrollMessenger contract, and astute users noticed the contract’s 46-bit ETH balance and were confused. The way this uniquely designed contract works is that it has a preset ETH balance starting from the genesis block, which means that when ETH is deposited on Ethereum, an equal amount is spent from this contract on Scroll The amount is similar to “casting ETH”. This is a more optimized approach that makes deposits both more cost-effective and technically simpler.
Base
Base occupies 40% of the contract deployment market share and accounts for more than 80% of the total ETH deployment.
Base is an Ethereum Layer 2 network developed by Coinbase, built on Optimism – the second largest L2 ecosystem in terms of TVL, second only to Arbitrum. The Layer 2 sequencer bundles users’ transactions together and submits them to Ethereum, just like an air traffic controller. Base’s sorter may have generated $7 million in revenue for Coinbase in Q3, largely due to use of social finance platform Friend.tech. By the end of Q3, sequencer revenue had dropped 74% from its peak in August, and was now generating approximately $200,000-$300,000 per week.
Since its inception, Friend.tech has paid Base via transactions approximately 10-13% of the total fees users pay to the sorter each month, with the highest paid being 20+ ETH. The app’s revenue has declined since September, in line with total sequencer spending, indicating more subdued activity in the broader ecosystem.
Despite declining sequencer revenue, the number of contracts deployed on Base exceeds all other major L2s since its launch in June 2023, accounting for an average of 40% of the leading L2’s weekly contract deployments. The number of contracts currently deployed by Base accounts for 80-180% of the number of contracts deployed on Ethereum L1, which shows that the ecosystem of developer activity is relatively strong.
Tx-Level Alpha: This is the first transaction into the Maple Finance pool of $500,000 USDC. This happens at the same time that Maple announced that they will be launching on-chain capital markets on Base on November 1st. This makes sense because this is the first credit market on Base and could mark the beginning of institutional DeFi momentum on L2.
zkSync
The number of payment master transactions of zkSync Era reached 150,000.
zkSync Era is a Layer 2 zkEVM built by Matter Labs to expand the suite of Ethereum, processing an average of approximately 1,000 payment master transactions per day, covering an increasing number of dApps. The Paymaster is a smart contract that enables dApps and wallets to sponsor user transactions and pay gas fees using any ERC-20 token, with custom logic that determines when a user is eligible to use these features. Paymasters on zkSync Era are enabled by native account abstractions built into the protocol and do not require third-party bundlers like ERC-4337 implementations.
Pudgy Penguins enters brick-and-mortar retail with Pudgy Toys, a QR code-enabled toy line that serves as a gateway to the Pudgy World open digital player experience on zkSync Era. 14,216 wallets have joined Pudgy World through the QR code included with Pudgy Toys.
Over the past few weeks, zkSync Era and Arbitrum have led in terms of daily transaction volume, processing an average of 500,000 to 800,000 transactions per day. In October, the zkSync Era exceeded 150 million total transactions, making it one of the most tested L2s.
Starknet
Starknet has the most active developers of any Layer 2 (515 people).
Starknet boasts the largest number of developers and the fastest adoption of any new ecosystem, ranking 7th among all crypto ecosystems. More than 80% of the projects are Starknet native projects, some of which are performing well in verticals such as Onchain Gaming (Loot Survivor, Briq, Influence, Dojo) and Argent, which has adopted Account Abstraction full-time, as well as DeFi projects like Ekubo and RabbitX.
Starknet has averaged 8.2 TPS per second with the 0.12 upgrade (called Quantum Leap) since August. However, this does not tell the whole story: Starknet transactions are equivalent to 1.5 EVM transactions thanks to native Account Abstraction (AA), which is an AA feature that improves user experience and security thanks to Multicall.
Starknet DeFi is on the rise, AVNU (a DEX aggregator) has $500 million in trading volume after 5 months, and Ekubo (founded by the former lead engineer of Uniswap) offers LPs $600,000 per year in fees, and the current TLV is $3 million. Despite the lack of incentives, DeFi’s TLV is still growing.
Tx-Level Alpha: A random block on Starknet. The block consists of a number of Multilles, as shown in Operation. These are a direct result of native Account Abstractions (also known as Smart Wallets). In a transaction, users can approve and exchange, greatly improving user experience and security since withdrawals cannot be made from the resulting proxy hack. This also means that TPS is flawed, which is why L2Beat is pushing UOPS (user operations) as a new metric.
