Mysterious Transaction Volumes on Optimism ($OP) Blockchain Spark Speculation

Mysterious transaction volumes on Ethereum scaling solution Optimism ($OP) have sparked speculation as to what happened to lead to such a significant transaction volume, as experts struggle to identify the cause.

According to on-chain analytics firm Santiment, Optimism saw a “massive spike” in stablecoin transaction volumes on its network, at the time the price of its native token $OP hit a local high.

? #Optimism saw a massive spike in transaction volume of #stablecoins on its blockchain, just as $OP hit its local top last week. Our latest insight covers the increase in address activity, transaction volume coinciding with price reversals and more. ? https://t.co/ZJ4UHsK3PQ pic.twitter.com/TVoIXqFJPT

— Santiment (@santimentfeed) December 21, 2022

Per the firm, the average transaction volume for leading stablecoins USDT and USDC on Optimism is less than $10 million When the price of $OP hit a high against $BTC last week, the transaction volume for these two stablecoins skyrocketed 9,900% to $1 billion.

While it could have been liquidity mining or wash trading on a platform. Token velocity, a measure of how frequently a token changes hands over a given period, surged along with the transaction volume.

The number of active addresses on the network notably did not spike, and only maintained a “healthy trend.” Per Santiment’s data, it has been steadily growing over time but did not explode upwards, suggesting the spike wasn’t caused by an influx of new users.

Optimism (OP) is a layer-two platform built on top of the Ethereum blockchain that aims to improve the scalability and accessibility of decentralized applications (dApps). It does this by using a technique called “optimistic rollups,” which allow dApps to offload some of their computation and data storage onto a separate layer, while still remaining secure and decentralized.

This technique enables low-cost, near-instantaneous Ethereum transactions by batching multiple transactions into one and settling them on the Optimism layer, with the data fed back to the main Ethereum network.

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