Optimism, one of new blockchains with increasing TVL and onchain activity, has shown quite some weird action recently, namely extremely high transaction volume of stablecoins on it:

Average USDT or USDC transaction volume on Optimism is less then $10M. The anomaly above skyrocketed both to above $1B.

Liquidity mining? Washtrading?

We can check token velocity:

Velocity was super high around that days.

Active addresses?

No anomalies in active addresses, only a healthy trend.

Additionally, we can see a similar anomaly on OP token itself:

It also coincided with a top of OP price against BTC and maximal bullishness in crowd.

There is probably some connection, we just don't know which one. Do you?

Keep an eye on Optimism, there a lot of things going on.

Bonus details:

• This address was executing huge amount of transfers: https://optimistic.etherscan.io/address/0xb1f190bf99fea986e2d4d99abb5be1a649d5247d
• An example of transaction: https://optimistic.etherscan.io/tx/0x7655c475d270e12aaf4aec9f4df027693d011ab2807a0925e2ddea2f1c62d52a
• Charts used: https://app.santiment.net/s/2ItCEZTF

There is an increasing demand in self custody. People are going to be using decentralized exchanges and stablecoins as a proxy more often. And this is how we see stablecoins usage on Ethereum compared to Arbitrum.

1. USDT, active addresses compared on a shared axis. Red — USDT on Ethereum, yellow — USDT on Arbitrum:

2. USDT, active addresses in different scales, to see the trend. Red — USDT on Ethereum, yellow — USDT on Arbitrum:

Observations:

• Stablecoin activity on Ethereum is way higher than on Arbitrum yet.
• Arbitrum stablecoin activity almost doubled, while it remain just slightly increased on Ethereum.

The above and few more charts for your review:
https://app.santiment.net/s/MIUbWQOa