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

Mysterious transaction volumes on Ethereum scaling solution Optimism ($OP) have sparked speculation as to what caused such a large transaction volume, with experts unable to pinpoint the cause.

According to Santiment, Optimism saw a “massive spike” in stablecoin transaction volumes on its network around the time the price of its native token $OP reached a local high.

According to the firm, the average transaction volume on Optimism for the leading stablecoins USDT and USDC is less than $10 million. When the price of $OP surpassed the price of $BTC last week, the transaction volume for these two stablecoins increased by 9,900% to $1 billion.

While it could have been liquidity mining or platform wash trading. Token velocity, which measures how frequently a token changes hands over a given time period, increased in tandem with transaction volume.

The number of active addresses on the network did not significantly increase, instead maintaining a “healthy trend.” According to Santiment’s data, it has been steadily increasing over time but has not exploded upwards, implying that the spike was not caused by an influx of new users.

Optimism (OP) is a layer-two platform built on the Ethereum blockchain with the goal of increasing the scalability and accessibility of decentralized applications (dApps). It accomplishes this through the use of a technique known as “optimistic rollups,” which enable dApps to offload some of their computation and data storage to a separate layer while remaining secure and decentralized.

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