Ethereum layer 2 bridging up sixfold year-on-year in Q1

Ethereum layer 2s, comparable to Optimism, Arbitrum and Polygon, elevated in recognition within the first quarter of 2023, in accordance with a report from Web3 improvement platform Alchemy. Ethereum customers bridged over $635,000 value of crypto belongings to those networks from January to March, a rise of 44% over the fourth quarter of 2023 and 518% over the primary quarter of 2022.

The report, titled merely “Web3 Improvement Report,” cited Dune Analytics as its supply for this knowledge. It confirmed that customers solely bridged roughly $103,000 value of belongings to layer 2s within the first quarter of 2022, whereas the identical three months in 2023 produced over $635,000 in bridging quantity.

Alchemy instructed that this elevated exercise could have been bolstered by profitable airdrops from Optimism and Arbitrum in Q1, 2023.

Along with elevated asset bridging from customers, layer 2s additionally confirmed larger exercise from builders. Though the deployment of good contracts associated to layer 2s decreased by 30% relative to This fall 2022, it nonetheless elevated by 160% when in comparison with Q1, 2022, the report mentioned.

The crypto business is coming off the again of a steep downturn in buying and selling quantity and crypto costs throughout 2022, with scandals just like the UST depegging and FTX collapse inflicting many traders to shrink back. However regardless of this damaging sentiment, customers nonetheless flocked to those new scalability options.

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The Ethereum ecosystem as an entire additionally confirmed elevated developer curiosity. Ethereum software program improvement kits (SDKs) comparable to Ethers.js, Web3.js, Hardhat and Web3.py had been downloaded 1.3 million occasions in Q1 2022. This grew to become 1.9 million within the first quarter of 2023, an 8% improve. As well as, downloads of the MetaMask SDK, a instrument used to develop apps that may work together with Ethereum pockets MetaMask, elevated in every month of the primary quarter.

Ethereum layer 2s have been supplied as an answer to Ethereum’s scalability downside, which has been periodically inflicting excessive gasoline charges since as early as 2020. Some consultants have argued that sharding the Ethereum community can even assist to chop down on gasoline charges.