Optimism’s Bedrock Upgrade Leads To 67% Hike In Daily Transactions

Optimism, the layer 2 scaling solution for the Ethereum blockchain, unveiled its Bedrock upgrade earlier this month. The upgrade led to a 67% increase in the transactions on the blockchain, with users registering as many as half a million transitions every day. The substantial reduction in the gas fees on Optimism could also be attributed to the latest update. 

Blockchain analytics firm Nansen recently took to Twitter to share Optimism’s post Bedrock metrics:

Bedrock was the first official release of the Optimism stack. The upgrade went online on June 6 and aimed to improve the blockchain’s node performance as well as its proof modularity. The upgrade also lowered Optimism’s transaction fees and cut deposit times by supporting layer-1 re-orgs, which reduced deposit confirmation time to 3 minutes. 

Data gathered by Nansen showed that following the Bedrock upgrade, Optimism registered 500,000 transactions on a daily basis. The transactions went from 328,000 to 500,000 within one week of the upgrade going live. Meanwhile, gas fees fell by a whopping 77% last week, reaching as low as $37,000. However, at the time of writing the fees had climbed back up to 51,000. 

According to Nansen, the top 10 crypto projects that made transactions on Optimism over the past seven days included USDC issuer Circle Internet Financial, DeFi protocol Stargate Finance, decentralized crypto exchange Uniswap, and USDT issuer Tether. Galaxe was the project with the most number of transactions, 528,190, to be precise. 

While Bedrock had a largely positive impact on Optimism, not all metrics were in the green. Optimism’s native token OP lost 33% of its value in the days following the upgrade. At press time, the token was trading at $1.33, down 11% compared to its pre-Bedrock value. The token’s daily trading volume also saw a decline of 50% since Bedrock went live.