Arbitrum Nova Dominates L2 Throughput Amid DePIN and GameFi Surge

Arbitrum Nova, a scaling solution from OffChain Labs facilitating high throughput, is dominating the Layer 2 throughput rankings despite falling outside of the top 20 L2s by TVL.

According to L2beat, Nova has consistently processed more than 44 transactions per second (TPS) for the last 10 days straight, accounting for between one-third and half of the combined throughput of Layer 2 networks.

Nova posted an all-time high of 53.2 TPS on March 4, driving to more than 4.9 million transactions in 24 hours, according to Arbiscan. For comparison, ZkSync Era ranked as the second most active Layer 2 with 10.9 TPS, while all L2s processed 104.2 TPS over the same period.

Nova’s surging activity comes despite the network ranking 22nd among Layer 2s by total value locked (TVL) with $50 million. Arbitrum One, OffChain Labs’s flagship scaling solution, is the largest Layer 2 with $15.3 billion, equating to 42.2% of the combined Layer 2 TVL.

Arbitrum Nova validators verify transactions off-chain, facilitating greater throughput than Arbitrum One but adopting a more centralized architecture.

Leading Arbitrum Nova projects

OffChain Labs told The Defiant that its spike in activity can be attributed to a small number of projects.

“A lot of the additional activity growth on Nova came from one DePin project called Arbius, their setup incentivized users to perform lots of transactions on-chain.” OffChain Labs said. “Arbitrum Nova activity has been steadily climbing from games that rely on the blockchain for game logic, [with] Pirate Nation and BattlePlan being the largest on Nova.”

Arbius styles itself as a decentralized artificial intelligence network powered by GPU miners. The project mobilizes the computational power of miners to power machine learning, rather than the traditional role of miners as blockchain validators. Arbius offers image generation, a virtual assistant, and AI model generation.

BattlePlan was launched on Nova by the web3 gaming studio PixelVault in December, comprising an on-chain autobattler. On Feb. 23, the project boasted 1,176 active users each day and 3,073 weekly.

Pirate Nation is an on-chain role-playing game that launched in July 2023. On Feb. 29, Proof of Play, the development team behind the project, launched Apex, its own Layer 3 network leveraging Arbitrum’s Orbit infrastructure. Apex has since hosted more than 1M transactions.