Metis, a fork of ethereum’s second layer, Optimism, has surpassed it in assets under custody shortly after launching.
Metis currently has $520 million of crypto assets, while Optimism is at $482 million according to L2Beat:
Arbitrum continues to dominate, but besides the exchange dYdX, Metis is the one in second position now, making it one of the most prominent second layers.
That’s in great part because Metis has issued its own token, while Optimism still does not have one, nor does Arbitrum.
The public has tokenomics incentives to use Metis thus, while Optimism remains controlled by VCs with no public ownership.
According to Metis’ github, it looks like they’ve just forked Optimism and added a token to it similar to Sushiswap forking Uniswap back in September 2020 with it quickly gaining popularity due to tokenomics, forcing Uniswap to also launch a token.
Whether Optimism will now also have to launch a token as well, remains to be seen, but a Uniswap like clone, Netswap, appears to be gaining attention on Metis.
This is pretty much Uniswap as you can see, but on Metis and with its own tokenomics unrelated to Uni, so people are farming on Netswap.
They have more than $100 million in liquidity and close to $23 million in daily volumes as can be seen in the featured image.
Making it a fairly decent performance for a new platform that has gone a bit under the radar despite it involving some crypto politics of sorts in forcing public platforms to be open to public ownership.
None of the four main second layers, Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync and Starknet, have a token. But, eventually you’d expect all four of them to have one for governance as otherwise a handful of VCs would be running the network.
They’re all still in the very early stages however, but Metis seems to think Optimism is already good enough to fork off, with the Metis token currently having a market cap of $290 million, $1.2 billion fully diluted, on $37 million of daily trading volumes.
