Optimism has had a few upgrades that will be able to keep it in the race against Polygon and Arbitrum. Polygon and Arbirum have Layer-2 scaling solutions but Optimism does not. A new Superchain protocol will soon be introduced by Optimism. It will be made up of chains using the OP stack. These chains are intertwined and they share a security and community layer. They also make use of the same open-source technology stack.
If you look at the information regarding Messari, Superchain has plans to enable atomic and trust-minimized cross-chain rollup communications hence managing to reduce the size of the attack surface and removing chain reorganizations. It will also reduce the costs by canceling out cross-chain consensus verification.
These upgrades are certainly going to attract more people to the Optimism protocol. During the press, OP was lagging behind Polygon and Arbitrum when it came to reports of daily activity. Polygon was the first in the chain while Arbitrum was the second. 432,000 active addresses were recorded for Polygon while 170,290 were recorded for Arbitrum. Optimism was the last in line with 116,200 addresses being recorded.
Optimism also ranked last when it came to the number of transactions and the decentralized finance sector. The TVL that was collected on the network was lower than the L2 protocols. The reason for this could be the fact that the reducing DEX volumes on the Optimism network hinting that the protocol may have to work on its decentralized finance sector.
The Superchain will determine whether Optimism stands a chance of shooting in the chain. The investors are confident that it definitely has a chance but only time will tell with the new upgrades.