Arbitrum extends lead over Optimism as Uniswap posts record volume on L2

DeFi users appear to be choosing Arbitrum over Optimism for scaling as Uniswap’s layer-two volume presses into record highs.

The world’s most popular decentralized exchange, Uniswap, is seeing layer two volumes surge as Ethereum transaction fees surge once again.

On Oct. 19, Uniswap founder Hayden Adams tweeted that daily volume across v3 deployments of the decentralized exchange on layer-two networks has pushed into record levels. Adams estimated that Uniswap v3 processed an unprecedented $115 million in combined daily volume across the Arbitrum and Optimism networks without providing a source.

Uniswap v3 on layer 2 (arb + OE) doing an all time-time high of $115m volume!!

2⃣ L2 season is here 🙂

— hayden.eth (@haydenzadams) October 18, 2021

While Adams’ post was published amid peak U.S. trading hours, data sourced from analytics provider Nomics at the time of writing (3 am UTC) suggests that Uniswap v3 drove $80 million in volume on Arbitrum and roughly $14 million on Optimism over the past 24 hours respectively.

However, Uniswap v3’s combined layer-two volumes are still tiny compared to its mainnet deployment — which currently represents $1.3 billion in daily activity according to CoinGecko.

Despite the Ethereum Foundation and crypto venture giant Andressen Horowitz backing Optimistic Ethereum, Arbitrum appears to have emerged as the DeFi community’s second-layer rollups solution of choice.

According to layer-two data aggregator L2beat, Aribtrum represents 60% of the total value locked (TVL) across layer-two networks combined since its mainnet launch in early September. Arbitrum’s TVL currently sits at $2.29 billion after increasing by 14% over the past week.

Decentralized derivatives exchange dYdX ranks second behind Arbitrum with $838 million or 22% of value locked in the sector. Comparatively, Optimism has just attracted just $269 million in locked capital, ranking as the third-largest layer-two with a 7% share of second-layer TVL.

The combined TVL of layer-two networks tagged a record-high $3.8 billion on Oct. 17.