Arbitrum and Optimism are two of the leading L2s today and make up for over 80% of total L2 TVL.

Over the last six months, both Arbitrum and Optimism have achieved a meteoric rise in user growth, experiencing 218% and 316% increases in daily active users (DAU) respectively.

In terms of daily transactions, Arbitrum had an impressive growth of 865%, while daily transactions on Optimism grew by 139%.

By overlaying key events onto both DAU and Daily TXN charts, we can determine the effectiveness of the BD and marketing strategies of both teams so far. Let's take a look. On Arbitrum, the Odyssey resulted in an explosion of user (wallet) growth and network activity on Arbitrum. The team had to pause the Odyssey eventually due to the stress on the network (pre-Nitro upgrade).

Despite this, the network continued to grow and has reached an almost feverish pace off the back of rumours of a token airdrop.

Over on Optimism, the first token airdrop resulted in a jump in DAU and daily TXNs as users rushed to claim the airdrop.

Network activity after that began to range before Season 1 of the OP Quests began, which resulted in a growth of 253% and 166% in DAU and daily TXNs respectively. Interestingly, network activity dropped up to 50% immediately after the quests ended, reaching pre-quests levels. This indicates that while the quests were successful in incentivizing activity growth, it failed to result in significant long-term retention of users or sustained increase in network activity.

Check out the full article on Blockcrunch, where we compare the native and non-native protocols on both chains, dig into the success of $GMX, and discuss upcoming catalysts for both chains.

Full article: https://blockcrunch.substack.com/p/arbitrum-vs-optimism-who-is-winning