Arbitrum: crypto activity increases – The Cryptonomist

Arbitrum has seen an increase in crypto activity on its protocol, thanks in part to increased forex demand from the DEX Gains Network (GNS). In addition, it appears that users of Ethereum’s Layer 2 have saved 94.5% on transaction fees.

Arbitrum: increases in activity in crypto, DeFi and on the DEX Gains Network (GNS)

Arbitrum’s burgeoning DeFi ecosystem is beginning to attract established projects from other blockchains. Gains Network is one such project (initially distributed on Polygon).

Gains Network is a major DEX (decentralized exchange) also built on the Arbitrum protocol that recorded huge amounts of forex demand on 27 February. This helped Arbitrum to have a large majority in terms of Open Interest.

gTrade by @GainsNetwork_io has become the first crypto project to capture sustained forex demand, making up the majority of open interest. pic.twitter.com/YTQNNmImrM

— Delphi Digital (@Delphi_Digital) February 27, 2023

The reported increases led Arbitrum to be the fourth largest DeFi system with over $2 billion TVL. 

Gains Network also turns out to be the fourth DeFi project with the highest protocol gain in crypto over the past 6 months. 

Not only that, Gains Network itself revealed that in the past seven days, the BTC/USD pair has been the most traded on the Arbitrum blockchain, with a volume of $203 million.

In the past 7 days:

💸 $GBP / USD was the most synthetically traded pair on @0xPolygon with $49M in volume.

📈 $BTC / USD was the most-traded @Arbitrum pair with $203M in volume.

On-chain asset diversity. Only on gTrade. 🤝🍏

— Gains Network 🍏 (@GainsNetwork_io) March 1, 2023

Not only that, in the last 24 hours, volume on Gains Network increased by 113.4%, touching $1 million, according to data on Dapp Radar. The number of active unique wallets is also up 17.28% from yesterday alone.

Arbitrum and the decrease in user fees

Another peculiarity of this Ethereum Layer 2 protocol, Arbitrum, is that in addition to scaling the reference blockchain, it offers users low transaction fees.

And indeed, according to data from Dune Analytics, Arbitrum users have saved up to 94.5% ETH by transacting on the protocol. 

Not only that, thanks to the low fees offered by Arbitrum, the overall number of active addresses on the network has increased. In recent days, the number of active users on the network has increased from 273,230 to 441,260, according to Dune Analytics.

This ability to pay low fees also caused Arbitrum’s number of daily transactions to exceed Ethereum‘s on 22 February. However, this was a fluke, as that number then began to decline.

OpenSea and the new support for Arbitrum NFTs

Recently, there was some big news also on the NFT front for Arbitrum: new support from the most popular NFT marketplace, OpenSea.

The thing is that even here, the Layer-2 proceeds in providing NFTs at a lower cost, becoming the cheaper alternative to Ethereum.

With this collaboration, OpenSea also becomes a member of the Data Availability Committee (DAC), the decentralized organization that aims to help grow Arbitrum’s data infrastructure. That organization already features other members of the likes of Google Cloud, Reddit, P2P, Consensys and QuickNode.