Optimism pitted against Arbitrum for the top spot

The heavy competition that has been brewing for a while now is beginning to heat up further amongst Ethereum’s Layer 2 blockchains. The point in question happens to be the fact of which one of them will be hitting the top spot in terms of scaling the number one smart chain network. 

The prime players in this happen to be Arbitrum being pitted against Optimism. However, there will be others too who will be joining the fray. The competition will revolve around gaining further users and developers.

Simultaneously, it will be the founders who will concentrate on attaining the top spot. Very recently, it happened to be Coinbase who also joined the race. 

In the case of Arbitrum, it managed to overtake Ethereum, where daily transactions are concerned. On its side, Optimism is aiming towards a lesser amount of competition and working on furthering collaborations through a business model that it has named super-chain. 

According to the Co-Founder of Optimism, Ben Jones, it happens to be a challenge to build out these networks of chains. In his opinion, all of these activities will have an influence on the Layer 2 ecosystem.

Another name for Layer 2 blockchains happens to be rollups. Their function is to batch and squeeze user transactions and then attach them to the Ethereum blockchain. Through this, the utilization of Ethereum becomes more convenient, with it becoming much quicker and less costly.

Advocates of rollups are of the opinion that they happen to play an extremely significant role where the future of Ethereum is concerned, as they are the required technology for speeding up the network, as well as making it cost-effective for the almost endless number of users. 

According to the Heads of Protocols at Coinbase, Jones and Jesse Pollak, the creation of a super-chain will be a difficult issue unless and until the different companies creating rollups come together. In their opinion, the new Coinbase rollup, Base and Optimism will not be competing against each other. The future will see them as being one chain, with more chains getting connected. This will turn out to be the super-chain. 

Entities such as Scroll, Polygon, Matter Labs and Consensus happen to be actively involved in zero-knowledge rollups. Aztec, for that matter, has already created a privacy-oriented rollup akin to the VPN of Ethereum. Optimism, as well as Arbitrum, happens to be created on optimistic rollup technology. Of late, Arbitrum managed to overtake Ethereum by processing 1.1 million transactions. That was 20,000 more than Ethereum. Presently Arbitrum has captured over 50% of the market share, compared to 30% for Optimism. 

In the opinion of the Co-Founder and CEO of Arbitrum, Steven Goldfeder, he is not a believer in the super-chain concept and feels no one method should be applied for all cases. He believes Optimism will not receive security measures from Ethereum unless it brings in fraud-proof technology. 

Without it, according to him, users will be compelled to lay their faith in Optimism. However, both Optimism and Coinbase agree on the fact that users of crypto applications should not have to ponder on which rollup to use. They both are also of one mind that the thought of a super-chain is easy, but the creation of one will come with lots of obstacles.