Major Layer-2 Blockchain Networks See Significant Decrease in Activity Except Arbitrum 

Leading blockchains including BNB Chain, Ethereum, Ronin, Polygon, Avalanche, and Celo, amongst others, have witnessed a significant decrease in on-chain activities in the past seven days, excepting Arbirum, whose on-chain transactions surged by more than 12 percent, according to a Nansen tweet on February 28, 2022.

Layer-2 Blockchains See Decline in Activity

According to a report released by Nansen, a blockchain analytics platform that enriches on-chain data with millions of wallet labels, all the established layer-2 blockchain networks have seen a steep decline in transaction activities in recent weeks except for Arbitrum.

For the uninitiated, layer-2 platforms simply refer to a secondary framework or network built on top of an existing blockchain protocol. The primary objective of layer–2 solutions is to mitigate the transaction speed and scalability challenges plaguing the major layer-1 cryptocurrency networks like bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum, and others.

Nansen notes that seven-day activity in terms of unique addresses, saw a massive drop across the top layer-2 protocols, with only the Ethereum L2 platform posting significant gains in the same period.

The Numbers

The Nansen team has revealed that Arbitrum attracted 46,200 unique active addresses over the past week, representing a 12.7 percent increase and making it the only L2 solution to post gains for this metric in the weekly timeframe.

In contrast, BNB Chain (formerly Binance chain) saw a 2.7 percent decrease in its unique active addresses, Ethereum slumped by 2.9 percent, Ronin -22.1 percent, Polygon -10.9, and Avalanche also witnessed a 14.1 percent decline.

What’s more, on-chain activities in other L2 protocols, including Fantom, Celo, and Arbitrum rival Optimism, also crashed by 4.7 percent, 14 percent, and 17.9 percent respectively.

As seen on L2beat, a layer-2 analytics platform, Arbitrum currently maintains a 54.52 percent market dominance over other L2 networks, with $2.93 billion in total value locked, followed by dYdX ($980 million TVL) and Optimism ($434 million TVL).

The total value locked (TVL) of Arbitrum saw a decent increase over the past seven days, moving up 5.7 percent since February 25. SushiSwap decentralized exchange is the most popular protocol on the platform with a TVL of $622.77 million, representing a 27.99 percent market dominance, according to Defi Llama.

Since hitting an all-time high of $69,000 last November, the bitcoin (BTC) price has been on a steady decline, triggering the same effect in the value of altcoins across the board, as well as a decrease in activity in decentralized finance (DeFi) space, with data available on Defi Llama showing that the TVL for major DeFi platforms is down by nearly 19 percent since that time.

At the time of writing, the combined TVL of the DeFi protocols listed on Defi Llama is sitting around $233.25 billion, with Aave (AAVE) maintaining an 8.09 percent market share.

On the other hand, the bitcoin (BTC) price has surged by 13.30 percent in the past 24 hours and it’s now hovering around the $43,459 price region, with the combined market capitalization of all crypto assets now sitting at $1.91 trillion, according to CoinMarketCap.