Recap of the Clash of L1s Trading Competition
💰On February 14th, we awarded 6,000 PERP to traders on the winning teams of the Clash of L1s. All participants that made at least one trade can also claim an NFT of their team’s banner here.
The results of the competition are shown below. All traders eligible for prizes have been sent PERP rewards directly to their address. You can check this Optimism transaction to check how much PERP you have won if you met the requirements and were on a winning team.
🤓 To learn more about how the competition went and what was learned, read on!
6,000 PERP Awarded as Prizes
More than 300 participants joined the Clash of L1s that met the eligibility criteria, bringing the available prize pool to 6,000 PERP (40% unlocked).
Here are the number of participants that joined, broken down by team:
Solana was the largest team with over 400 people joining, followed by ETH with 273. The teams with the lowest number of members were team BTC (132) and team LUNA (133). A total of 318 participants have minted their team’s banner as an NFT through Project Galaxy.
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Despite realizing the highest losses, team BTC had the lowest number of liquidations. And despite winning both the most profit and most volume categories, team SOL saw the second highest number of liquidations.
To join the Clash of L1s, participants had to send out a tweet to pledge allegiance to their team. The most influential teams as measured by the combined number of Twitter followers were SOL and LUNA (with a combined follower count of 90,503 and 60,483 respectively), while team BTC was the least influential with just 12,539 followers across all members.
$111M Trading Volume
Over $111 million in trading volume was generated across all 5 teams. Team SOL won the most volume category by a large margin, trading a total of $84.3 million worth of contracts during the competition. Team BTC had the lowest volume, with just under $750K.
Most of the volume was generated on the first day of the competition with Team SOL accounting for a large share of the trading activity on January 25th.
The highest number of trades by Clash of L1s participants were executed on January 28th and 29th. The last 3 days of the competition also saw a higher frequency of trades placed, as shown by the chart below.
500x Cheaper than Ethereum Mainnet
During the competition, the gas cost of opening a position via Optimism was, on average, 500x cheaper than if the same action was executed on the Ethereum mainnet.
The graphic below illustrates both the gas fee for opening a position on Perp v2 (which ranged between $1.18 to $2.49 during the Clash of L1s) and the savings multiple compared to L1.
As more users switch over to dApps on Optimism, the gas fees per transaction are likely to drop much further. Also, upcoming optimizations to Optimism’s optimistic rollups will contribute to further cost reductions when trading derivatives with Perp v2.
One bit of feedback we received is that if you do not hold ETH, then this presents an extra barrier to trading on Perp v2. To remove some of the frictions from bridging assets, we’ve launched an Optimism faucet, which allows anyone who deposits a certain amount of USDC on Optimism to receive a small amount of OETH. Users can then exchange USDC for OETH using Uniswap to cover their L2 gas fees.
What’s Next
- Continue adding more markets.
- Integrate cross-chain liquidity protocol LI.FI into the Perp v2 UI to make bridging from any chain to Optimism seamless.
- Improve the UI based on feedback from the trading competition.
- Use feedback and learnings from Clash of L1s to host another competition.
