The famous layer-2 crypto of Ethereum Arbitrum yesterday achieved a result not yet matched by any competitor: 150 billion dollars in volume generated on the chain.

This is an incredible achievement by Arbitrum, which in less than 3 years since its inception has managed to establish itself as the fifth richest chain of all time, behind only Solana, BNB Chain, Tron, and Ethereum.

Let’s see below which specific dapps have helped layer-2 to record so much swap volume and how the ARB crypto is performing graphically.

Arbitrum Layer-2: the crypto ecosystem grows and the chain surpasses 150 billion dollars in traded volume

Arbitrum has officially become the first Ethereum layer-2 to surpass 150 billion dollars in cumulative swap volume.

The official profile X of Uniswap announced it, a multi-chain DEX that also relies on Arbitrum, commemorating the great achievement of the second layer chain.

Just a year ago, in May 2023, the infrastructure exceeded the threshold of 50 billion dollars in swap volume, celebrating the relentless growth of its ecosystem after the ARB crypto airdrop two months earlier.

This means that in 1 year exchanges worth 100 billion have been recorded, with an acceleration of the trend in the first months of 2024.

The layer-2 ranks as the fifth blockchain for TVL according to the ranking by DefilLama, with a total of locked funds of 2.6 billion dollars, behind only Solana, BNB chain, Tron, and Ethereum. If we also consider bridged funds not committed to decentralized applications, the TVL rises to 16.35 billion dollars (data from L2beat).

In this regard, as shown in the following Dune Analytics dashboard, the total number of bridge operations to and from Arbitrum amounts to 721,202 tx today, while the transited value is 3,716,815 ETH.

Among the protocols DEX that have contributed the most to generating a cumulative swap volume exceeding $150 billion, we find several important names.

The first one obviously is Uniswap, the largest decentralized exchange platform in the entire DeFi sector, responsible for a trading volume of 267 million dollars in the last 24 hours.

Next we find Ramses Exchange, Cameleot, TraderJoe, Pancakeswap, Hashflow, Sushiswap, Dodo, Vertex, Balancer and GMX.

Overall in the last 24 hours, the layer-2 Arbitrum has totaled volumes of 466 million dollars (not only swaps), with inflows of 6.7 million dollars and a net revenue of about 11,000 dollars.

Analysis of the price of the crypto ARB

Despite the great achievement reached by Arbitrum as the first layer-2 to have surpassed 150 billion in cumulative swap volume, the governance token ARB doesn’t seem to be moving so cheerfully in the market.

The crypto, introduced for the first time in crypto exchanges in March of last year with an airdrop to early users of the ecosystem, after a few months of difficult price action had taken off between the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024.

In particular, from October 16, 2023 to January 8, 2024 ARB grew by about 200%, going from 0.8 dollars to 2.4 dollars, and then returning to a distribution trend.

However, from the local highs of March, the layer-2 token loses 53% of its value, emerging as one of the worst-performing high-cap cryptocurrencies in terms of performance in recent months.

However, ARB is now in concomitance with the key support of 1 dollar and could be rejected upwards from here on. Eyes also on the resistance of 1.35 dollars, which could absorb the next bull rallies.

In a context like this, the different unlocks of new tokens introduced to the market by the Arbitrum Foundation weigh heavily, as well as the particularly uncertain situation of the market that must face geopolitical tensions and macroeconomic difficulties.

Also in the middle there is Bitcoin and its influence on the altcoin market, which has not benefited in a positive way on layer-2 tokens.

On the derivatives field, looking at the Coinglass data we can say that ARB has recorded a heavy collapse in open interest between April 9 and 14, causing almost 200 million dollars in positions to evaporate.

The funding rate has been significantly reduced while remaining in positive territory and liquidations have been modest in recent days, with the only peaks reached during the REKT days in mid-April.

There has been a total reset of the speculative force that governed the futures markets on ARB, as well as for many other cryptographic assets: from now on, Arbitrum’s crypto can restart calmly, aiming for new highs by the end of the year.