Optimism Overtakes Arbitrum, Complete Guide to Rollups

🚨 In Case You Missed It

Notable celebrities‘ addresses received ETH from sanctioned Tornado Cash wallets. List includes Jimmy Fallon, Shaquille O’Neal, Dave Chappelle and others.
Circle froze $75,000 of USDC linked to addresses sanctioned by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control.
Infura and Alchemy, crypto infrastructure providers, blocked RPC requests to Tornado Cash, preventing users from accessing the application.
FTX and Circle confirmed they will only support the Proof-of-Stake version of Ethereum after the final Merge.
FTX and Reddit announced a partnership to tokenize community points using Arbitrum.

📊 Optimism Overtakes Arbitrum in TVL

On August 6, the total value locked (TVL) on Optimism overtook the TVL on Arbitrum for the first time.
We saw a drastic increase of 78% within two days as TVL rose from $555 million on August 4 to $992 million on August 6. Currently, the TVL stands at $1.1 billion.
Almost all of the increase in TVL can be attributed to the launch of OP incentives on Aave v3. The protocol is set to distribute 5m OP tokens to users of its Optimism money markets over the course of 90 days.
The TVL on Aave v3 increased by over 1,400% since the launch of OP incentives on August 4. Over the following two days, over 85k ETH worth of assets were bridged from Ethereum to Optimism.
The price of OP actually led the drastic rise in TVL, increasing by 72% over the last week of July.
On August 31, Arbitrum is launching Nitro, an upgrade to decrease gas costs and increase transaction speeds. Soon after, Arbitrum plans to resume the Odyssey event, which can serve as a potential catalyst to reverse this trend.
For more on L2s, Delphi members can read our Delphi Pro report here.

⚡ The Complete Guide to Rollups

Current rollups settle to Ethereum where they have a smart contract deployed on the base layer. As rollups decentralize and smart contracts become battle-tested, these rollups could scale Ethereum and approach the same level of security.
You can also build rollups on top of these rollups, so-called “L3s.” These potentially offer even higher scale and customizability.
Sovereign rollups are another option – they post data to a base layer like Ethereum or Celestia but then choose not to rely on it for settlement.
Enshrined rollups would be years away, but Ethereum may be able to upgrade its own settlement layer to a zkEVM someday. It could even deploy many parallel instances.
Even more speculative – enshrining a rollup in Celestia someday could make sense. It gives Celestia a way to bridge its token to other rollups and back in a trust-minimized way. It could capture additional value by subsidizing Celestia’s security budget. It could serve as a settlement layer for other rollups.
Value accrual is important for the economic security of a base layer asset. This means capturing fees and other forms of MEV. Understanding how value will flow in the modular stack is critical to design.
For more information, Delphi members can read the full Delphi Pro report here.

🐣 Notable Tweets

Deep Dive on Tornado Cash Sanctions

READ THIS THREAD OR GO TO JAIL FOR 30 YEARS (sorry not kidding)

Tornado Cash added to US sanctions list – $437m of assets blocked.

What is OFAC, what are sanctions, and what does this mean for DeFi 👇

—BowTiedIguana (@BowTiedIguana) Aug 8, 2022

Bitcoin Core Developer on Maximalism

1/ Bitcoin maxis are a dying breed. While there was a time where ~everything except Bitcoin was basically a scam, that hasn’t been true for a long time, and the smart money has moved on to figuring out which projects are going somewhere, and which are straight pump-and-dumps.

—Matt Corallo (@TheBlueMatt) Aug 8, 2022

Warning Against CEXs Running PoS Validators

1/5 The biggest cringe in the PoS ecosystem is the presence of centralized exchanges as validators. They create an insane disproportion and potentially bring about harm to the blockchains they validate. @krakenfx’s recent failure to validate for nearly 3 days is a case in point.

—Sergey | Everstake (@sergattic) Aug 8, 2022

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