The year 2023 has started off splendidly for the Ethereum Layer 2 ecosystems. All of the major cryptocurrencies, including Arbitrum, Optimist, Polygon, and Metis, are expanding rapidly and significantly. There also seems to be a lot of progress being made, such as the implementation of new protocols, incentive programs, and enhancement initiatives.
Observing and comprehending the overall current atmosphere, more and more players seem to be jumping into the fray. zkSync has put forward its offer for builders to position their protocols, along with the Polygon and zkEVM mainnet beta, all ready and prepared to carry out their launch towards the end of the month of March, 2023.
Over the course of the last six months, the number of daily transactions, the total value locked (TVL), and the number of active addresses in the Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) ecosystem, Arbitrum, have skyrocketed. While airdrops and other token incentives were speculated to have contributed to the remarkable rise, no such evidence has materialized. For its part, Arbitrum aspires to be the first Ethereum Layer 2 to support many programming languages. The release of Stylus, a new and improved IDE, will do this.
Optimism, on the other hand, which happens to be yet another Ethereum Layer 2 ecosystem, formed an association with Coinbase in order to be able to create its very own standalone Ethereum Layer 2 and collectively carry out the enhancement of the OP Stack, which boosts the Optimism chain. Optimism is slated to become the most economical L2 with the imminent Bedrock scaling. This will help push the growth pattern of the entity further. Synthetix, which happens to be the biggest protocol that has been created on Optimism, has also successfully delivered Synthetix V3, which will also act as a pushing force.
There are also other L2 ecosystems to watch out for, such as Polygon, zkSync, zkEVM, and Metis. Polygon, together with zkSync, has successfully acquired funding to the tune of $1 billion. Following the launch of their mainnets, big incentive programs will be in the offing, providing more impetus to the overall growth of L2. It is expected that Metis will also be introducing an incentive program.
Ethereum happens to be an open-source, distributed computing platform that is based on blockchain technology and has the ability to implement smart contracts. Along with that, the entity also happens to be providing the opportunity for developers to be able to create decentralized applications (dApps) and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).