As Optimism continues to grow and welcome more protocols, the DEX Aggregator meta present on the Ethereum Mainnet gains more prominence and competition intensifies. This report was prompted by the veteran aggregator ZeroSwap announcing its arrival on the L2:

With the landscape getting busier, we’re going to have a closer look at how current aggregators compare in terms of usage and adoption. The observations are made on the data collected by the time of publishing, but a dashboard that can be further explored and interacted with has been created👇:

☝️ The dashboard can be updated on-demand by pressing the refresh button 🔄 in the top right corner of the page.

*The time frame of the data observed in this report spans over the last month. This time frame can be extended using the timeframe_months parameter of the live dashboard.

I. Users

First up, users. How many are interacting with each of the aggregators and who’s bringing in the most new users.

By the time of writing, aggregators such as 1inch, Matcha and Slingshot have already built a strong footing. We can see their popularity among Optimism addresses by the number of daily distinct users, where the three are in close competition. In the case of the newly arrived ZeroSwap, user acquisition is more in line with OpenOcean and WardenSwap, but still very modest.

As a whole, we can see two groups heading in separate directions as the market already matures and users choose their preferred platform.

On one hand there are WardenSwap and OpenOcean who have been gaining significantly less new users over the last month. Although ZeroSwap is in the same range, it is still in its very early days. Not off to an astounding launch, but its fate is not yet sealed. On the other hand we have 1inch, Matcha and Slinghot, pushing towards new heights and becoming evermore popular.

II. Swap Counts

Overall, Optimism aggregators have a slowly increasing number of swaps going through their platforms. However, by tracking the number of daily swaps each platform executed over the observed time frame, there is a clear leader.

Close to 60% of all aggregator transactions were executed by Slingshot, with a total of almost 60k swaps. It is notable that a large portion of these swaps were generated in a short period mid August, but we can still see it regularly having the greatest share of daily transactions out of all the aggregators.

Part of its success and the August 15-16 spike can be attributed to their teaming up with Layer3 to spread some $OP to its users:

III. Trading Volume

As we could see in the previous section, most of Slingshot’s usage over the last month was generated thanks to its rewards campaign incentivizing users to trade on its platform. Although a huge success, it unsurprisingly generated only modest trading volumes. Having this push however, it managed to get its monthly volume close to that of Matcha, a seasoned aggregator that has shown excellent performance across many other blockchains.

Below we can see that most of the volume goes through 1inch, with $155 worth of assets being swapped, or 69% of the aggregators trading volume in the last month. The performance of the platform has been sustained over the entire period, with over 50% of the market share on almost every day.

*If you would like to see a volume breakdown by aggregator and by asset, please check the live dashboard. The section is a bit long but I made sure to leave some warning signs so you know what you’re scrolling into.

Conclusion

At first glance, the aggregators market on Optimism can seem crowded and winners decided. Slingshot and Matcha have great user bases and daily usage. 1inch has excellent volume. WardenSwap and OpenOcean are not a great hit.

Although the traction of some platforms in each of their own specific department might make it seem like the race has ended, it is far from it.

As showcased by the marketing success of Slingshot, the OP Summer can rapidly heat up the competition and make waves in this space. Users can quickly be onboarded to a new protocol and volumes don’t have any loyalty. So even though ZeroSwap can barely be noticed compared to the rest of the market, there’s reasons to be optimistic about their future success on the L2 network.