OpBNB Leads Superchain Adoption While Base and Optimism Lag

OpBNB, BNB Chain’s Layer 2, is enjoying a surge of adoption, with its throughput closely rivaling that of the BNB Chain mainnet.

According to Opbnbscan, the L2 hosted an average of 31.5 transactions per second (TPS) over the past 24 hours, compared to 37.2 TPS on the BNB Chain mainnet.

OpBNB’s throughput equates to 48% of the combined throughput of Ethereum and its entire L2 ecosystem combined. OpBNB also tagged a record high of 63.3 TPS on Nov. 27.

The surge in activity follows sluggish adoption during the first three months following opBNB’s launch, smashing the L2’s previous throughput high of 9.1 TPS in mid-October.

On Nov. 29, BNB Chain announced plans to double opBNB’s maximum throughput from 100 TPS to 200 TPS with future upgrades, including the adoption of EIP-4844.

OpBNB leads ‘Superchain’ growth

OpBNB announced it was building on top of the OP Stack, the modular tech stack from top Ethereum Layer 2, Optimism, ahead of its mainnet launch in August.

Optimism launched the OP Stack as part of its Bedrock upgrade to much fanfare in June. The OP Stack allows teams to permissionlessly deploy their own Layer 2 networks leveraging Optimism’s technology. Optimism said OP Stack-based chains will be unified into an interconnected ecosystem of networks called the “Superchain” in the future.

OP Stack-based chains appeared poised to dominate Ethereum’s Layer 2 sector in mid-2023. Base, the OP Stack-based Layer 2 from Coinbase, enjoyed rocketing activity following its mainnet rollout in August to quickly emerge as a leading Layer 2 by transaction volume.

Base tagged an all-time high of 21.3 (TPS) in September, according to L2beat. Coupled with Optimism’s OP Mainnet, which tagged its own record high of 10.3 TPS in late July, the burgeoning superchain would have topped the L2 rankings by throughput throughout most of September.

However, activity on both networks has since receded, with Base and OP Mainnet driving just 5.3 TPS combined in the past 24 hours — ranking the hypothetical superchain third behind Arbitrum and ZkSync Era by throughput.

Lyra to join Superchain

Lyra, a decentralized options protocol integrated with Synthetix and GMX, is set to become the newest Optimism Superchain as part of its v2 overhaul.

Lyra first announced its v2 iteration in July, before unveiling plans for an OP Stack-based appchain called Lyra Chain in September.

Lyra said its v2 iteration will also feature gasless transactions, improved capital efficiency by combining margin and cross-asset collateral, and incremental liquidations to ease the impact of margin calls on traders. Lyra also estimated its forthcoming iteration can support 15 times more volume per dollar of protocol TVL than its first iteration.

However, Lyra posted a steep downtrend throughput 2023, with its TVL now down 92% from its December 2021 all-time high of $125M, currently hosting just $9.6M worth of assets.