# 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/
# What is Velodrome?
Velodrome is an AMM modeled on Solidly and designed to be a public good that provides deep liquidity and low slippage to token pairs critical for the growth of the Optimism ecosystem. It was incubated by veDAO, an early entrant into the Solidly Wars on Fantom blockchain.
After the collapse of Solidly, VeDAO took the lessons learned and used Andre’s open source code to create their own take on a ve(3,3) AMM. Thus, Velodrome was born, and the experiment continues on a new chain: Optimism.
veDAO launched with the purpose of giving ordinary people an opportunity to own and control a portion of Solidly.
In the course of this work, the veDAO team developed deep subject matter expertise on both Solidly and ve(3,3), learning what is and isn’t working for Solidly and its broader ecosystem — expertise that we’ll apply to evolve Solidly and bring its next-generation capabilities to Optimism.
# Data Analysis
In this analysis, I’m going to be comparing Velodrome to the the current market leader for DEXes — Uniswap. Specifically, I’ll be looking at Uniswap v3 on Optimism.
## Daily Numbers
Looking at the daily transactions numbers we can see Velodrome flipped Uniswap on July 16th! Even though Uniswap’s daily transactions has increased since then, Velodrome has facilitated more swaps.
We saw a similar flippening in the “Daily Active Users (DAU)” metric on July 16th but Uniswap has again regained the lead since July 22nd.
Uniswap regaining the lead in the “DAU” metric is down to a massive spike in new users joining recently. Overall, since June more new users have been joining Uniswap than Velodrome daily.
## Weekly Numbers
Aggregating numbers to weekly makes it easier to see the patterns.
- The week of July 18th was the first week where Velodrome flipped Uniswap for total swaps.
- Velodrome still has a long way to go on the “Weekly Active Users” metric.
- Uniswap regained a massive lead in the week of July 25th with 10K active users compared to 4K for Velodrome.
## Cumulative numbers
With the recent increase in Velodrome swaps, Velodrome has overtaken Uniswap v3 in the number of swaps since June!
The total users is a different story (as we saw before) and Uniswap still has a sizeable lead here — 16K vs 7K.
## Popular Assets
Now we ‘re looking at the popular assets being swapped from and to across the two DEXes. We notice the following patterns:
- The top 5 assets swapped from and to on Velodrome and Uniswap are the same with nearly the same ratio of transactions. This is likely because of arb swaps.
- USDC is a top 3 most swapped asset across both DEXes with USDT not seeing as much volume. USDT is #5 on Uniswap and completely absent on Velodrome.
- Optimism (OP) is a much more swapped token on Velodrome than Uniswap.
## Top asset pairs
- The top asset pair on both the DEXes involves USDC as one of the tokens which is not surprising given the above charts.
- OP-USDC is the most dominant pair on Velodrome accounting for nearly ~68% of the swaps!
- USDC-WETH accounts for ~45% of the swaps on Uniswap.
- The #2 pairs on both DEXes are the #1 pair on the other DEX.
Looking at the growth rates of the top asset pairs, we can see that the OP-USDC pair recently took off around July 16th. Therefore, the recent flippening of Velodrome swap volume is driven by this pair and the corresponding uptick in OP price.
- The top pair on Uniswap, USDC-WETH, has seen a more linear growth since June.
- The OP-USDC pair on Uniswap has also seen a recent uptick in number of swaps.
# Conclusion
- Velodrome has recently overtaken Uniswap in the daily swap volume.
- Uniswap still leads on the daily active users metric.
- Uniswap has recently seen a lot of new users onboard in the second half of July.
- Most of the new swap volume on Velodrome has been driven by the OP-USDC pair. Uniswap’s OP-USDC has seen a similar uptick in volume.
# Interactive Dashboard
https://app.flipsidecrypto.com/dashboard/optimism-de-xes-velodrome-vs-uniswap-v-3-46fCyP
