In a major development coming out from the world of Ethereum and the layer-2 scaling solutions built on top of it - popular L2 Arbitrum has managed to flip Ethereum in daily transactions count for the first time ever! This event occurred late on 21 February 2023 and resulted in increasing Arbitrum's standing in the industry as a leading player in the layer-2 market.

Arbitrum is essentially an Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution that supports smart contracts without the limitations on scalability and privacy that Ethereum provides. Users working with Arbitrum are thus able to enjoy attractively low transaction fees and significantly higher transaction speeds thanks to lower congestion as compared to Ethereum's mainnet.

Arbitrum also allows developers to create smart contracts by using code to specify the behavior of a virtual machine that implements the contract's functionality. Further, Arbitrum can also be used to improve upon the security and privacy features on top of the ones already provided by Ethereum.

Arbitrum records 590% growth YTD in transaction count, crossing the 1 million mark

According to a report by popular crypto news publication, CoinDesk, the number of daily transactions on Arbitrum jumped from 159,919 in daily to over 1.1 million as of writing this article, representing a roughly 590% growth in less than two months, take a look.

CoinDesk in its report compiled the data from respective block explorers, Arbiscan.io and Etherscan.io, to create a superimposed chart depicting the daily transaction count on Arbitrum flipping Ethereum's daily transaction count. While at the time of writing, Arbitrum had a daily transaction count of over 1.1 million, Ethereum had about 1.08 million at the same time, thus the flip in this metric.

In the same timeframe, the increase in the number of daily transactions on Ethereum has been a meager 46% as against Aribtrum's 590%!

Arbitrum also records nearly 90% TVL growth in 2023!

Arbitrum happens to be the fourth-largest blockchain network overall, in terms of total-value-locked in decentralized finance (DeFi), according to data from DefiLlama. On that front too, Arbitrum's TVL has seen a nearly 90% growth from the beginning of 2023 increasing from around $1 billion to currently around $1.89 billion in TVL.

Alongside this, Arbitrum's network is also very close to achieving the milestone of hitting the 3 million mark on the number of unique addresses on the network. However this is a metric that Ethereum is on a different level altogether, with ETH's unique address count standing at about 223 million as of writing.

Arbitrum's incredible growth story since the beginning of 2023 can be largely credited to the ever-increasing popularity of GMX, the decentralized perpetual exchange native to the Arbitrum network which also happened to overtake Ethereum in daily fees last week!

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According to data from crypto analytical platform Nansen, the growing layer-2 ecosystem provided by Arbitrum has also seen a huge growth in the number of decentralized finance (DeFi) applications emerging like Camelot, Vela Exchange and Radiant Capital - all of which have seen their users and transactions increase by over 100% in the past 24 hours.

Despite Arbitrum's skyrocketing popularity and activity within the ecosystem, it is still well behind Ethereum in terms of network fees too. While Ethereum's one-day transaction fees stand at about $6.7 million, Arbitrum is at a paltry $154,000 on a daily basis - according to data from cryptofees.info

However, it seems that Arbitrum will continue to see growth in popularity in the days to come, especially amid raging speculations of a potential airdrop despite the lack of any official confirmation from the developer team at Arbitrum. Thus, tying all of it together, one can look at Arbitrum as a potential candidate for incredible growth in the sector!

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