Sometime last week, KyberSwap, a DEX aggregator suffered a massive hack.
The DEX was exploited via several chains. At the end of the day, the hacker had made away with nearly $50 million.
However, while the market seems to be cooling off from last week's events, several side effects of this attack continue to appear.
According to recent reports, OP the second most popular scaling solution for Ethereum has experienced a record-breaking surge in DEX trading volume over the last few days, flipping even Ethereum's by several billion dollars.
More details below:
Optimism is no small fry in the Ethereum ecosystem.
The native cryptocurrency of the L2 solution is ranked 41st overall in terms of market cap and boasts a remarkable $1.57 billion in market cap.
However, one more metric has exploded over the last week, according to data provided by DefiLlama.
DefiLlama data shows that OP commands $777 million worth of TVL, and has risen by 31.7% in terms of dominance on Synthetix, at the time of writing.
However, this isn't even the only thing that has spiked.
DefiLlama data also shows that the cryptocurrency has recorded a 7-day DEX trading volume of about $11.89 billion.
For a little bit of context, Ethereum, the largest chain by far in terms of TV, was only able to garner $9.17 billion worth of trading volume within the same time frame.
But what exactly is going on? Why is OP suddenly beating its parent blockchain?
It turns out that there is a plausible explanation for what is going on. As suggested by Chinese reporter, Colin Wu in a recent tweet, the recent surge in several metrics on Optimism may have been because of the recent KyberSwap attack.
During this exploit, about 10,049 WETH, 4,017 wstETH, and 3.98 million ARB tokens simply vanished without a trace.
Wu suggests that tens of millions of dollars simply entering the market in such a short timeframe, may have been one of the leading causes of this massive OP spike.
From a longer-term perspective, Optimism has had quite a story to tell around the $1.9 resistance.
According to the charts, Optimism was last above this price zone in the first half of the year.
The cryptocurrency spent the latter half of the year under this price zone, going as low as $0.895.
However, $OP is retesting $1.9 and may have the perfect chance to break above very soon. If a surge does happen, a likely price target for $OP would be the $2.6 zone.
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