$ARB 2-3 years ago, one of the biggest stories in the crypto space was the battle between arb and optimism versus $ZK versus $strk
Everyone was talking about TPS, transaction fees, TVL, and which L2 would ultimately dominate Ethereum scaling.
Then, the story gradually faded away.
But now $ARB is moving back, and I think it’s worth asking:
Are L2s becoming interesting again? And if $ARB has moved, where might the next opportunity be?
Ethereum’s L2 rollups are currently securing about $35.4B in value, up ~27% year over year.
Among the biggest:
– @Base: ~16.5B USD TVS
– @Arbitrum: ~11.9B USD TVS
– @Optimism Mainnet: ~1.9B USD TVS
@arbitrum probably has the clearest catalyst right now.
In H1 2026:
– 478 million transactions processed
– 2.7 billion lifetime transactions
– Average monthly stablecoin transfer volume above $70B
– $206M ecosystem GDP
– $6.19M in revenue generated for the ArbitrumDAO
– More than 2,000 tokenized RWA deployments
– Derivatives OI up 434% in 6 months
And Robinhood Chain could be the bigger story.
It runs on Arbitrum infrastructure, and the AEP licensing fee accounted for 35% of ArbitrumDAO revenue in July—the first month on mainnet.
So, in my personal opinion, this new L2 battle looks very different from the old one.
Back then:
TPS → lower fees → incentives → TVL
Now:
RWA → stablecoin → institutional users → appchain → real revenue → token value capture
Everyone was talking about TPS, transaction fees, TVL, and which L2 would ultimately dominate Ethereum scaling.
Then, the story gradually faded away.
But now $ARB is moving back, and I think it’s worth asking:
Are L2s becoming interesting again? And if $ARB has moved, where might the next opportunity be?
Ethereum’s L2 rollups are currently securing about $35.4B in value, up ~27% year over year.
Among the biggest:
– @Base: ~16.5B USD TVS
– @Arbitrum: ~11.9B USD TVS
– @Optimism Mainnet: ~1.9B USD TVS
@arbitrum probably has the clearest catalyst right now.
In H1 2026:
– 478 million transactions processed
– 2.7 billion lifetime transactions
– Average monthly stablecoin transfer volume above $70B
– $206M ecosystem GDP
– $6.19M in revenue generated for the ArbitrumDAO
– More than 2,000 tokenized RWA deployments
– Derivatives OI up 434% in 6 months
And Robinhood Chain could be the bigger story.
It runs on Arbitrum infrastructure, and the AEP licensing fee accounted for 35% of ArbitrumDAO revenue in July—the first month on mainnet.
So, in my personal opinion, this new L2 battle looks very different from the old one.
Back then:
TPS → lower fees → incentives → TVL
Now:
RWA → stablecoin → institutional users → appchain → real revenue → token value capture
