How Arbitrum flipped Ethereum’s [ETH] daily transactions

• Unique addresses on the Arbitrum chain reached ATH as it beat Ethereum’s daily transactions.
• Arbtirum contracts decline but TVL remains the fourth-largest.

Arbitrum, on 22 February, announced to the crypto community that it had surpassed the Ethereum [ETH] mainnet daily transactions for the first time. While the speed of achievement might be bewildering, the milestone looked like it was eventually going to happen. 

For the first time ever, Arbitrum One processed more transactions than Ethereum

This is a huge milestone achieved by our team and Arbinauts. We’ve come a long way as a community and we’re grateful to have you along with us!

Our mission to scale Ethereum continues! 💙🧡 pic.twitter.com/hHCCCH3JTl

— Arbitrum (💙,🧡) (@arbitrum) February 22, 2023

Leaving contenders behind

For several weeks, the layer-two (L2) scaling solution had registered consistent increases in user activity and transactions. Similarly, linked Decentralized Exchanges (DEXes) like Canto had also benefited from the recognition. This was at Optimism’s [OP] expense which failed to match up with the Arbitrum stride. 

An assessment of the data from the Arbiscan showed that the highest transactions happened on 21 February, roughly beating the one million transaction mark. And, this occurred despite being a bit stagnant in terms of its Total Value Locked (TVL).

Before Arbtirum, Polygon [MATIC] had successfully crossed the ETH daily transactions once. This happened in the early days of 2022 but the scaling solution operates as a layer-one (L1) protocol. Hence, no other L2 chain had edged out Arbitrum in this regard.

Source: DeFi Llama

Meanwhile, Arbitrum’s TVL rise in 2023 has been enormous. The TVL describes how investors value a project. So, a rapid increase infers that a protocol is healthy and worth committing liquid assets into. 

That has been the case for Arbitrum whose TVL had increased 62.10% in the last 30 days. However, the rate at which the TVL surged had decreased recently as investors’ input had only been minimal.

Regardless of the deceleration, the frenzy around the Arbitrum chains still seems to be high.

As requests troop in, Arbitrum contracts…

There were also notable reactions that followed the milestone disclosure. For some, it was about time for Arbitrum to have its own token like OP.  For others, zk rollups like Polygon were eventually going to lag behind Optimistic rollups where Arbitrum falls.

Despite the resounding cheers, Arbitrum contracts created were at an unimpressive point. These contracts enable developers to implement smart contracts on the Ethereum mainnet and the Arbitrum second layer chain.

Source: Dune Analytics

According to Dune Analytics, the cumulative contracts created at press time was 1.5 million. But as of 20 February, only 33,700 contracts were open.

However, information from the open-source data provider revealed that Arbitrum’s active addresses had increased for a while. The metric serves as a good indicator of the daily users. At the time of writing, the active addresses had decreased to 275,450.

Source: Dune Analytics