Optimism closes in on Arbitrum, but…

• Optimism’s active addresses and holders’ count surpassed that of Arbitrum.
• While Arbitrum led NFT traction, OP held it down with social dominance.

Like two contenders for a medal, the competition between Optimism [OP] and Arbitrum [ARB] has been fiery. Most times, Arbitrum has emerged victor, but now it seems that the former is not giving up on conceding to the other Ethereum [ETH] L2 scaling solution.

Realistic or not, here’s OP’s market cap in ARB terms

One reason for this is how Optimism’s active addresses grew in June. According to an on-chain insight platform, Optimism’s unique monthly addresses increased by 20% in the last month.

Active addresses on @optimismFND are starting to catch up with Arbitrum, with the network seeing nearly 20% growth in unique monthly addresses last month pic.twitter.com/PIuHLMVXwE

— Nansen 🧭 (@nansen_ai) July 19, 2023

OP gets more traction

For context, a chain’s active addresses show the entire activity on the network. And this includes smart contracts deployment, interaction with decentralized Applications (dApps), and regular token exchange.

However, this does not imply that Arbitrum stunted but Optimism’s growth over the last month was far ahead of it.

When considering the network growth, Santiment showed that both projects have not had an impressive month. Regardless of that, Optimism’s network growth was 970, while Arbitrum’s flatlined at 461 at press time.

This suggests that Optimism had many more new addresses coming into the ecosystem than the traction Arbitrum had.

Source: Santiment

In terms of social dominance, it was a similar case of OP’s supremacy. Social dominance is measured by looking at the percentage of discussions about an asset compared to other cryptocurrencies. 

At the time of writing, Optimism’s social dominance was 2.54% compared to Arbitrum’s at 1.05%. So, this difference suggests that the hype around Arbitrum had decreased while Optimims seem to be getting a much larger share of attention.

Source: Santiment

ARB NFT traders lead but OP holders…

Another metric to consider while addressing the state of these optimistic rollups is the NFT volume. For one, before its full Mainnet launch, one of the ways Arbitrum gained quick adoption was by allowing NFT trades on its network. 

Despite already reduced volume, Arbitrum’s NFT volume rose as high as $18.36 million on 28 June. During the same month, Optimism also recorded some highs. However, its total NFT trades count did not reach Arbtitrum’s peak.

Source: Santiment

The data above suggests that most NFT traders are still inclined toward Arbitrum collections than its opposite number. Interestingly, there has also been a change in the number of holders of OP and ARB.

Is your portfolio green? Check the Optimism Profit Calculator

Previously, ARB could boast about having more holders. But at press time, on-chain data showed that OP’S total number of holders was 892,000. On the other hand, despite its growth, ARB had 722,00 holders.

Source: Santiment

In conclusion, the recent Optimsim growth across board puts pressure on Arbitrum. While this is no confirmation of a winner between both, it, however, means that the competition might get heated going forward.