# What is Optimism & Layer 2?
While still one of the most heavily used networks in the space, Ethereum suffers from high transaction fees and confirmation times. This prevents it from its full vision of being a network for finance. To facilitate that vision, several projects have emerged with scaling solutions, and one of the most popular of those is rollup-based solutions.
One of these is Optimistic Ethereum, or Optimism as it’s more often known. This is a rollup scaling solution that greatly reduces gas fees and quickens transaction times.
Optimism works by moving transactional and computation processes off the mainnet chain.
Source: https://jamesbachini.com/optimism-tutorial/, https://beincrypto.com/learn/optimism/
## Optimism Native Bridge
The optimism bridge is a pretty simple experience like swapping on any DEX. You connect your wallet, select the token and hit deposit.
## Hop Protocol
In addition to the native bridge, Optimism boasts an expansive ecosystem of bridges.
Although Layer-2 networks have “native bridges”, the process to move tokens from one scaling solution to another or even back to the Ethereum base layer via these bridges is slow and can often take up to a week to exit your tokens to Ethereum L1. One of the popular bridges is the Hop Protocol. Hop is the quickest way to bridge ETH and other tokens to Optimism from different networks
Sending to Optimism using Hop is a pretty easy experience given the nice UX!
# Observations
## ETH transfers
Since its launch in September, Hop has been seeing daily usage, often times more than the native bridge for sending ETH.
More importantly, the Hop bridge is used more than the native bridge for withdraws given its exit-speed.
Looking at the daily net ETH transfer, we can see that the amount of net deposits on Hop have decreased while that on the native bridge has increased significantly.
Most recently after the OP airdrop, there seems to have been a lot of ETH deposited into Optimism.
## Daily Active Users
Looking at the daily active users, both of these bridges are neck and neck and I can’t find a difference between the two! It seems most users are using these bridges interchangeably.
## ERC-20 token transfers
Now, we turn our attention to ERC-20 token transfers and we can see the variety of tokens going through the native bridge.
OP token leads with almost 800M bridged to Optimism! Behind OP are the popular stablecoins — USDC, USDT.
Moving on to Hop bridge which only allows 4 ERC-20 tokens to be transferred — USDC, USDT, DAI, MATIC. We can see USDT and DAI lead the pack here. However, lately both of these stablecoins have been net negative on the day which means liquidity is being withdrawn through this bridge in this bear market.
# Conclusion
The native and Hop bridge cater to different sets of users.
- Native bridge allows for transfer of all kinds of ERC-20 tokens while the Hop bridge only allows a select subset.
- The daily active users for both bridge are pretty similar.
- Compared to the native bridge, the Hop bridge is much more used for token withdrawals due to its speed.
- In this bear market, we’re seeing net negative liquidity flow out of the Hop bridge.
