David Angliss, an analyst with Australia’s leading cryptocurrency investment firm, Apollo Capital, shares the fund’s weekly take on what’s happening in the fast-changing and volatile cryptocurrency space.

Arbitrum has taken an early lead over Optimism and its competitors in the race to be the dominant layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum.

On Friday Arbitrum had 41.8 per cent of the layer 2 market with $2.53 billion in total value locked, according to L2Beat, while Optimism was fifth with $438 million in TVL. Sandwiched between them was dYdX, Boba Network and Loopring.

But don’t crown Arbitrum the victor of this race just yet – Optimism is still growing, David Angliss says.

“They no longer have whitelisting for projects, so we’re seeing a massive influx launch, essentially because the training wheels have been taken off and projects have been given the go-ahead to launch on Optimism,” he told Stockhead on Friday.

During Optimism’s initial launch phase, projects had to be on a “whitelist” to operate, which caused a bit of a controversy with Sushi and its then-chief technical officer. But now the Optimism environment is permissionless, as befits a crypto platform.

“So we’re seeing heaps of new projects pop up everyday.”

There’s been OptiPunk, a CryptoPunk-inspired NFT project that raised $108,000 for the Optimism public benefit corporation, Angliss says.

“And some really bridging protocols as well,” such as Layerswap, Angliss says.

The newest protocol to launch on Optimism will be dHEDGE, the decentralised investment fund co-founded by Apollo Capital chief investment officer Henrik Andersson.

dHEDGE essentially lets anyone act as an investment fund manager, so they can attract their own capital and execute their own strategies. The platform integrates into the Synthetix ecosystem, the protocol for slippage-free trading of synthetic assets founded by Sydneysider Kain Warwick.

dHEDGE is also launching a project on Polygon called Toros Finance, a suite of on-chain tokenised derivatives projects. At first Taurus will offer leveraged tokens for taking positions on Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Lastly, dHEDGE is also launching a series of “dynamic bonds” inspired by Olympus Pro.


Angliss says Apollo are big believers in dHEDGE, but don’t hold any DHT tokens, given Andersson’s involvement in the project.

The views, information, or opinions expressed in the interview in this article are solely those of the interviewee and do not represent the views of Stockhead.
Stockhead has not provided, endorsed or otherwise assumed responsibility for any financial product advice contained in this article.

For more crypto news, follow the author on Twitter, Stockhead’s crypto-themed Twitter account, and its Facebook page.

Read MoreCryptocurrency

You might be interested in