• Arbitrum’s total value locked (TVL) has jumped by 81% year-to-date all the way to $1.85 billion.
• Arbitrum is seeing strong user growth amid a surge in DeFi activity on the Layer-2 blockchain.

Layer 2 blockchain networks have been in the news recently for some good reason. On Tuesday, February 21, layer-2 scalability solution Arbitrum managed to surge past Ethereum in daily transactions. Arbitrum is slowly emerging as a leading Layer-2 rollup and is quickly growing its dominance in the market.

The total number of daily transactions on the Arbitrum blockchain has jumped by more than 6 times since the beginning of 2023. On January 1, 2023, the daily transactions on Arbitrum were 159,919 and today they have shot past over 1,103,398, thereby making a nearly 600% increase in less than two months.

At the same time, the number of unique addresses on the Arbitrum network has reached an all-time high of about 2.95 million addresses. As per data from TVL aggregator DeFiLama, Arbitrum’s total value locked (TVL) has jumped by 81% year-to-date all the way to $1.85 billion.

While Arbitrum sees a boost in daily addresses and transactions, the blockchain is still lagging behind Ethereum in terms of network fees. Currently, the Ethereum blockchain garners a single-day network fee of $6.7 million, however, the same for Arbitrum is just $154,000. This is less than 2.3% of Ethereum’s network fees.

Arbiturm’s Surge In User Base

Among all the leading blockchain networks, Arbitrum has the fastest-growing user base as of now. Referring to the rising DeFi activity on the Arbitrum blockchain, Gautam Chhugani and Manas Agrawal wrote:

Arbitrum is seeing aggressive growth in users/active users/transactions/revenue, led by wider adoption and the scale up of DeFi and gaming applications on the chain.

Arbitrum is witnessing a growing app system, specifically the gaming and DeFi applications that are driving the growth. Crypto derivatives exchange GMX alone is contributing around $400 million in daily volumes and $500,000 in daily revenue. Some of the other trading platforms emerging from Arbitrum are Vela, Gains Network, Camelot, Dopex, Lyra, Rage Trade, and Butter Finance.

As per market analysts, the increase in the activity on Arbitrum is due to users speculating about a potential Arbitrum drop.

Hope Finance Exit Scam on Arbitrum

The Layer-2 scalability solution Arbitrum has seen strong growth, however, not all is well on the platform. Earlier this week on Monday, February 20, the Arbitrum-based decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Hope Finance suffered a $2 million exploit.

On its Twitter account, Hope finance announced that the hacker stole everything which is around $2 million from the platform. The hacker turned out to be a Nigerian named Ugwoke Pascal Chukwuebuka who conducted the exploit before transferring the funds to Tornado Cash. Blockchain security firm Peckshield has also confirmed that the hacker stole around 1,095 ETH, worth more than $1.86 million.