aaach airdrops and airdrops give them all to me

GM explorers!

Welcome to The Map and the Territory, Nansen’s weekly alpha leak newsletter where we try to cut through the noise – the headlines, the tweets, and the mania – with onchain data in an effort to surface actionable signal.

This week we’re taking a look at a simmering rivalry between competing Layer 2 networks: Arbitrum and Optimism. Both scaling solutions are hovering around $1 billion in Total Value Locked (TVL), and have enjoyed recent surges in activity, users, and buzz. Let’s take a look at how you can use Nansen to analyze these networks!

Layer 2 Playgrounds

It’s a weird market! Even seasoned traders are struggling to make sense of it. 

Ethereum is on the move, up roughly 20% on the week, while other majors labor to keep up. Alts, meanwhile, are a grab-bag, with unexpected names like Celsius and Nexo counting among the few who’ve managed to outpace ETH on a 7-day basis. It’s an idiosyncratic bid, with the overwhelming majority of the market’s attention focused on The Merge and the LSD (Liquid Staking Derivative) trade. 

Want to track how top-performing wallets are playing the LSD trade? Sign up for a Nansen account today!

However, there are a handful of ecosystems that are managing to outperform – specifically, two scaling solutions for Ethereum: Arbitrum and Optimism, both of which have seen native projects surge in recent weeks. 

The networks have long been entangled in an unofficial rivalry, with both teams boasting different technical solutions to the same problem. They raced to be first to market, and now are engaged in a back-and-forth battle for TVL with a different leader seemingly by the week. More importantly, though, the rivalry is also stoked by loudmouth CryptoTwitter investors and ecosystem projects – everyone is worried that only one L2 will emerge victorious, and no one wants to be left holding a bag. 

aaach airdrops and airdrops give them all to me

GM explorers!

Welcome to The Map and the Territory, Nansen’s weekly alpha leak newsletter where we try to cut through the noise – the headlines, the tweets, and the mania – with onchain data in an effort to surface actionable signal.

This week we’re taking a look at a simmering rivalry between competing Layer 2 networks: Arbitrum and Optimism. Both scaling solutions are hovering around $1 billion in Total Value Locked (TVL), and have enjoyed recent surges in activity, users, and buzz. Let’s take a look at how you can use Nansen to analyze these networks!

Layer 2 Playgrounds

It’s a weird market! Even seasoned traders are struggling to make sense of it. 

Ethereum is on the move, up roughly 20% on the week, while other majors labor to keep up. Alts, meanwhile, are a grab-bag, with unexpected names like Celsius and Nexo counting among the few who’ve managed to outpace ETH on a 7-day basis. It’s an idiosyncratic bid, with the overwhelming majority of the market’s attention focused on The Merge and the LSD (Liquid Staking Derivative) trade. 

Want to track how top-performing wallets are playing the LSD trade? Sign up for a Nansen account today!

However, there are a handful of ecosystems that are managing to outperform – specifically, two scaling solutions for Ethereum: Arbitrum and Optimism, both of which have seen native projects surge in recent weeks. 

The networks have long been entangled in an unofficial rivalry, with both teams boasting different technical solutions to the same problem. They raced to be first to market, and now are engaged in a back-and-forth battle for TVL with a different leader seemingly by the week. More importantly, though, the rivalry is also stoked by loudmouth CryptoTwitter investors and ecosystem projects – everyone is worried that only one L2 will emerge victorious, and no one wants to be left holding a bag.