Who's winning the race between Ethereum layer 2?

Hello everyone! It appears to me that the race to propose faster and cheaper chains will be run by Ethereum's layer 2, more than by alternative layer 1. I say this because a chain like BASE, which is literally two months old, already has much more TVL than Solana and Cardano which have been around for years (although it's important to note that BASE is still too young for data to be statistically meaningful and that high TVL can be temporary). What I'd like to find out, is which of Ethereum layer 2 seems the most promising and will likely attract more users in the future.

I made the comparisons with DefiLlama, which is a fantastic tool in my opinion.

First of all, I compared Arbitrum with Optimism, as they are the biggest layer 2. I'm not including Polygon as its proper layer 2 (zkEVM) has just been live for some months.

Currently, Arbitrum has a TVL of 1,6 billion $, while Optimism counts 600 million $. I feel that TVL can be influenced by the fact that Arbitrum is more used for DeFi, while Optimism is more used for gaming, so active users may be a better indicator to look at. In these terms, Arbitrum still exceeds Optimism. It's interesting to note that Optimism was a lot more used than Arbitrum until March 2023, when ARB was airdropped. So it appears that the airdrop worked as a great marketing tool to onboard new users.

Both Arbitrum and Optimism are based on a technology called optimistic rollups. There are also layer 2s that make use of zero-knowledge roll-ups: a different way of cryptographically proving transactions' validity. Zk SyncERA and Polygon zkEVM are the main examples. They launched in the same period, but ERA gained a lot more tractions and currently hosts 119 million $ TVL, while Polygon zkEVM only sits at 19 million $. zkSync also hosts more protocols and users. This is probably due to the fact that people are speculating on a possible airdrop by zkSync and are using the chain to obtain it. Polygon is also much more known for its other chain (that isn't technically an Ethereum layer 2).

In conclusion, Arbitrum seems to be the prevalent chain currently, but I'm very curious to see how BASE will develop and if GameFi on Optimism will actually become a trend. Which of these chains do you use the most?

​