L2 on-chain data comparison of the five major projects Polygon zkEVM, Scroll, Base, zkSync, Starknet

Comparison of On-chain Data for the Top Five Projects Polygon zkEVM, Scroll, Base, zkSync, Starknet

Author: Spencer Noon Translation: Matsumi, LianGuai

1. Polygon zkEVM

Polygon‘s CDK stack: Usage has approximately doubled in the past 30 days.

Polygon zkEVM is built on the Chain Development Kit (CDK), a series of open-source modular components for launching custom blockchains within the Polygon and Ethereum ecosystems. The active wallets, transactions, and TVL of Polygon zkEVM (built on CDK) continue to grow. Compared to the previous 30 days, the 7-day moving averages of active wallets and transactions have increased by 105% and 83% respectively. During the same period, TVL has grown by 14%. On November 8th, Polygon’s zkEVM had 15,500 daily active wallets and 56,800 daily transactions.

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Within 24 hours of initiating withdrawals on Polygon zkEVM, 14,000 wallets on Ethereum have completed 39,000 withdrawals of at least 101 different tokens. Since July 20th, the number of withdrawals within 24 hours has increased significantly, making Polygon zkEVM one of the fastest native bridges.

The chains utilizing the CDK stack include Astar, Canto, Near, and LianGuailm. In total, these chains (including Polygon zkEVM) have amassed nearly 11 million active wallets and 452 million transactions since 2022. They have brought approximately $162 million TVL to the CDK ecosystem.

Tx Level Alpha: 35 minutes. This is the time it takes for the wallet to receive and collect 105.77 ETH (worth $224,000) on Ethereum from Polygon zkEVM through the native Polygon zkEVM bridge after initiating a withdrawal. The almost instant withdrawal feature of Polygon makes it one of the fastest local bridges for wallets to send funds from L2 to Ethereum.

2. Scroll

Within 3 weeks, Scroll mainnet has accumulated TVL of over $36 million, more than 3 million transactions, and over 1 million addresses.

Scroll is a community-first native zkEVM built on Ethereum, designed to scale without sacrificing security, developer or user experience. Scroll officially announced its mainnet launch on October 17, 2023, and has since experienced rapid growth. The total value locked in Bridged has exceeded $36 million, with approximately half of it being in DeFi protocols (this number may increase as more projects get indexed). The transaction volume and unique addresses have both seen a significant surge, surpassing 3 million and 1 million respectively.

Bridge/DeFi TVL, transactions, and unique addresses

Since the genesis block, the average daily gas prices have dropped by 84%. For an early-stage zkEVM, as the number of users and transactions increases, the transaction costs actually show a significant decrease (and stability); this is because the fixed cost of verifiers is spread out across more users.

Average gas price chart on Scroll blockchain explorer

To celebrate the mainnet, Scroll announced the launch of Scroll Origins NFT for early smart contract deployers after the genesis block on October 26. The event has successfully increased deployments on Scroll, with an average verified contract increase of 92% since the announcement (around 1000 per day in the past few days).

Daily verified contracts on Scroll blockchain chart

Tx Level Alpha: This is the creation transaction of the L2ScrollMessenger contract – sharp-eyed users noticed the 46 ETH balance of the contract and were confused. The unique design of this contract works as follows: it starts with a preset ETH balance from the genesis block, which means that when ETH is deposited into Ethereum, an equivalent amount is allocated to the contract on Scroll, similar to “minting ETH”. This is a more cost-effective and technically simple approach to depositing.

Third, Base

Base contract deployment market share reached 40%, accounting for over 80% of ETH deployments.

Base is an Ethereum layer 2 network developed by Coinbase, built on top of Optimism (the second-largest L2 ecosystem after TVL Arbitrum). The sequencer on layer 2 bundles user transactions together and submits them to Ethereum – like an air traffic controller. In the third quarter, Base sequencer revenue could bring in $7 million for Coinbase, largely thanks to the use of the social finance platform Friend.tech. As of the end of the third quarter, sequencer revenue has dropped 74% from its peak in August, currently generating around $200,000 to $300,000 per week.

Sequencer Revenue

Since its inception, Friend.tech has paid approximately 10-13% of the total fees users pay to the sequencer through transactions on Base, with a maximum payment of over 20 ETH. Since September, the application’s revenue has declined in line with sequencer fees, indicating less activity in the wider ecosystem.

Friend.tech Technical Fee Reduction

Despite the decrease in sequencer revenue, since its launch in June 2023, the number of contracts deployed on Base has surpassed all other major L2s, averaging 40% of weekly contract deployments on the leading L2. The number of contracts currently deployed on Base accounts for 80-180% of the contracts deployed on Ethereum L1, indicating a relatively strong ecosystem of developer activity.

New Contracts (L2)

Ratio of contracts deployed on Base to Ethereum L1

Tx-Level Alpha: This transaction is the first $500,000 USDC inflow into the Maple Finance pool. At the same time, Maple announced that they will launch an on-chain capital market on Base starting from November 1, starting with the cash management pool. This is significant as it is the first lending market of its kind on Base and can be seen as the beginning of institutional DeFi momentum on L2.

Fourth, zkSync

zkSync Era has completed 150,000 LianGuaiymaster transactions.

zkSync Era is a second-layer zkEVM created by Matter Labs to scale Ethereum, averaging about 1,000 cash transactions per day in an increasing number of dApps. LianGuaiymaster is a smart contract that allows dApps and wallets to sponsor user transactions and pay Gas fees in any ERC-20 token, providing custom logic when users are eligible to use these features. LianGuaiymasters on zkSync Era are enabled by the protocol’s built-in native account abstraction and do not require third-party bundlers like the ERC-4337 implementation.

ZkSync era: LianGuaiymaster usage

Pudgy Penguins have entered the physical retail space through Pudgy Toys, a toy line that serves as a gateway to Pudgy World, the open-world digital player experience on zkSync Era. 14,216 wallets have joined Pudgy World through the QR codes that come with Pudgy Toys.

Total number of Pudge Penguin wallets

Number of wallets created: Pudge Penguin wallet creation

zkSync Era and Arbitrum are leading in daily transaction volume, averaging between 500,000 and 800,000 transactions per day in recent weeks. In October, zkSync Era’s total transaction volume exceeded 150 million, making it one of the most tested L2 solutions.

Daily transaction volume

Chapter 5: Starknet

Starknet has the highest number of active developers among all L2 solutions (515).

Starknet has the highest adoption and fastest growth capabilities among all emerging ecosystems, ranking seventh in the entire crypto ecosystem. Over 80% of projects are native to Starknet, with some having promising applications in blockchain gaming (Loot Survivor, Briq, Influence, Dojo) and account abstraction. Argent announced full-time commitment to Starknet and DeFi, partnering with companies like Ekubo and RabbitX.

Top ecosystem with monthly active developers, data from Electric Capital’s Developer Report (Note: Polygon’s PoS is technically a combination of sidechain and L2.)

Starknet is put into production through the 0.12 upgrade (called Quantum Leap), averaging 8.2 TPS since August. But it doesn’t show the full picture: with the help of Native Account Abstraction (AA), a Starknet transaction is equivalent to 1.5 EVM transactions, thanks to Multicall (an AA feature) that improves user experience and security.

Starknet DeFi is flourishing, with AVNU (a DEX aggregator) reaching a trading volume of $500 million after 5 months, and Ekubo (led by a former Uniswap engineer) generating $600,000 in annual fees for LP, with the current TLV being $3 million. Despite the absence of an incentive mechanism, DeFi TLV continues to grow.

Tx-Level Alpha: This is a random block on Starknet composed of many multcalls, as shown in the operation. These are direct results of Native Account Abstraction (also known as smart wallets). In one transaction, people can approve and swap, greatly improving user experience and security, as proxy hackers generated from this won’t exhaust anything. This also means there are flaws in TPS, which is why L2Beat promotes UOPS (UserOps themselves) as a new metric.

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