Optimistic Resilience
Introduction
The sudden collapse of FTX shacked the crypto market on November 8th, 2022 again. Last time, just 5 months ago, on May 20th, 2022, the blockchain world experienced another plunge as a result of UST depegging. This may happen again in the near future. The question is how the blockchain world will respond to the next turbulence.
To answer this question we should deeply understand the effect of the incidents. This dashboard focuses on the Optimism blockchain and attempts to portray how this chain was affected by FTX collapse and surrounded tumulus.
The effect of the FTX collapse will be examined in the following aspects:
- OP price
- Users adoption
- Users activities (particularly swap activities on SushiSwap)


The first response of the crypto market to the FTX insolvency presents itself in the fall of BTC price.
The graph below shows the hourly BTC and OP price over time. We can see how OP price and BTC price went hand in hand after the collapse. The scatter plot supports this correlation.
The findings reveal that Op price response to the collapse was the same as the BTC coin.
The graph next to this box shows how the number of new users on Optimism has changed since the beginning of November.
We can see that the daily number of new users decreased after November 8th. Except on November 12th, 2022, the other days experienced less level of user adoption.
New user is defined as users who executed their first transactions.
The effect of the incident on user adoption should be examined for a longer span.
To have a base for comparison here we focus on Swaps on a single DEX: SushiSwap.
The data shows that:
- Unlike Optimism other chains experienced the higher number of swaps.
- Similarly Optimism is the only chain that lost its number of swappers.
The boxes below show the one week change of different metrics.
As can be seen, the number of transaction as well as the number of active users in the week after the collapse were the higher than the ween before while the ETH value of transaction has decreased.
Surprisingly, the average transaction fee in the week after 77% increased in comparison to the week before.
We can see that on overall swap activities in the week after the collapse is lower than than the week before. Number of swap and unique swappers as well as the volume of swaps and the average volume of swaps has decreased after the collapse.
Two periods are compared in this section: 1 a week before 8th November and a week after 8th November.
To better understand of the FTX collapse on the Optimism blockchain comparison view would be more helpful.
In this section changes in optimism will be compared with three other chains: Ethereum, Polygon, and Arbitrum.
Data shows that:
- Number of transactions on all chains has increased after the collapse.
- Number of active users similarly on all chains has growth since the collapse.
- Unlike Optimism, the other chains had an increase in the ETH value of transactions.
This dashboard examines the FTX collapse impact on the Optimism blockchain. Four main factors have been focused on: Price, user adoption and user activities in general and swap activities in particular.
To have a bigger picture, the FTX collapse impact was investigated among three additional related blockchains and over time.
The analysis reveal that all selected chains have been affected by the incident.
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Price immediately dropped down by the incident.
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user adoption has decreased since the incident.
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the number of transactions on average increased.
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The number of swaps and swappers has increased for all chains except Optimism.
We can conclude that among Ethereum related chains Optimism on Sushi has most affected by the incident that should be carefully considered.