Optimism Flips Arbitrum Market Cap Amid Crypto Market Downturn

By Nivesh Rustgi

Monday’s carnage in the crypto market on Monday caused the market cap of Arbitrum to slip below that of rival project Optimism.

Arbitrum’s governance token ARB dropped to a new all-time low of $0.745, according to data from CoinGecko, while Optimism’s OP token gained 6.8% in the past 24 hours to trade at $1.33. Currently, ARB has recovered some of its losses and is trading at $0.782, at par with yesterday’s price.

The flipping of the two projects’ market caps occurred due to considerable liquidations of ARB long orders. CoinGlass data shows $2.2 million longs were liquidated on Sept. 11, levels not seen since August’s flash crash.

ARB liquidations levels. Source: CoinGlass

The bullish hype prior to the liquidations can be attributed to PlutusDAO’s introduction of an ARB staking proposal on Sept. 9.

Notably, the total market caps of Arbitrum and Optimism layer-2s are separated by just $66.9 million, with both holding around $1 billion.

Fundamentals remains unchanged

The number of transactions and daily addresses interacting on Arbirum and Optimism has remained consistent since the start of September, with Aribtrum total transacting continuing to lead Optimism, according to a Dune dashboard by pseudonymous data analyst @mslib7.

It suggests that the price surge was primarily due to the futures liquations.

The number of transactions per day on Arbitrum and Optimism. Source: Dune

Optimism’s transactions briefly outpaced Arbitrium during the hype around the launch of global ID project Worldcoin, which is built atop Optimism's infrastructure. However, they slipped back below Arbitrum's transactions as the hype around Worldcoin faded.

According to data from DeFiLlama, the total value locked (TVL) in DeFi applications on the two protocols has been on a downward trend. However, there haven't been significant moves to outperform each other.

Arbitrum’s TVL of $1.67 billion stands at more than 2.5 times that of Optimism's TVL at $0.63 million.

The total value locked in DeFi protocols on Arbitrum and Optimism. Source: DeFiLlama

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