The expansion of Ethereum layer-2 networks is expected to keep rising in the year 2023

Ethereum's second-level networks have experienced a dramatic rise in activity over the last few months, and this development is expected to remain in 2023. Data indicates that the major layer-2 networks have witnessed an increase in daily active users, which has in turn caused an upsurge of fees in the respective ecosystems.

Token Terminal's analysis reveals that Polygon is at the head of the pack with 313,457 daily active users on Jan 17; however, the metric ballooned to more than 600,000 during early January. This represents a 30% rise in activity since early October, which has produced an estimated $55,000 in daily fees for Polygon.

Optimism has witnessed much more significant growth, with a 190% surge in daily active users in the last three months. This has resulted in daily network fees of $119,475, a jump of nearly 140% since the start of the year.

Arbitrum One is currently hosting 41,694 users every day, which is a growth of around 40% in the last three months. The fees charged per day on the network stand at around $40,000, according to the figures.

On the other hand, the L2ecosystem analytics platform L2beat states that Arbitrum is leading with a market share of 52% in terms of total value locked (TVL), which is now at $2.55 billion. It was observed that there has been an increase of 9% in TVL for Arbitrum in the past week.

Optimism, the second biggest L2 network, has a TVL of $1.46 billion, giving it a market share of 30%. The collateral locked in this platform has increased by 15% in the last seven days.

The TVL of both these networks together constitutes more than 80% of the total value locked in all layer-2 networks. The total value locked in all L2s has gone up by almost 10%within the last week, taking the total TVL to $4.89 billion. However, this figure is still lower than its peak of $4.89 billion in April by 34%.

Despite the significant decrease, this drop is not as big as the retreat of DeFi TVL since t's peak. As reported by DeFiLlama, DeFi collateral has decreased by a whopping 75% since December 2021, which may indicate that layer-2 networks are becoming more sought-after and popular.

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