OpenChainBench

Arbitrum vs Optimism

Arbitrum leads on 5 of 6 shared benchmarks, Optimism on 1. Arbitrum wins on Fastest L2 block time, live across Robinhood, Arbitrum, Base and 7 more (259 ms vs 1.92 s), Fastest free public RPC for Ethereum, BNB, Polygon and 23 more chains (plus Solana and Polkadot) (252 ms vs 332 ms), Fastest LayerZero source chain by end-to-end message delivery (31.50 s vs 1.4 min), Fastest Hyperlane source chain by end-to-end message delivery (10.53 s vs 22.94 s). Optimism wins on Fastest Chainlink CCIP source chain by end-to-end delivery latency (17.5 min vs 19.0 min).

Read methodology Last measured Window: rolling 24h8 shared benchmarks
Arbitrum logo
Arbitrum

Optimistic rollup built on Nitro stack with a fast-finality sequencer. Sub-second block times (~250 ms) via a 250 ms default block interval, far below the 2 s OP Stack convention. 7-day fraud-proof window for L1 finality.

Optimism logo
Optimism

Optimistic rollup and the canonical OP Stack reference implementation. 2-second sequencer block time, 7-day fraud-proof window, anchored to Ethereum L1 via batch submissions to the Optimism Portal.

Side by side measurements

Frequently asked questions

Arbitrum vs Optimism: which one is better?

Arbitrum and Optimism are compared on 8 shared OpenChainBench benchmarks. Arbitrum leads on Fastest L2 block time, live across Robinhood, Arbitrum, Base and 7 more. Optimism leads on Fastest Chainlink CCIP source chain by end-to-end delivery latency. See the live table on this page for every metric.

Which is faster on fastest l2 block time, live across robinhood, arbitrum, base and 7 more, Arbitrum or Optimism?

On the Fastest L2 block time, live across Robinhood, Arbitrum, Base and 7 more benchmark, Arbitrum leads at 259 ms versus Optimism at 1.92 s. Live measurement is updated continuously by the OpenChainBench harness.

Which is faster on fastest chainlink ccip source chain by end-to-end delivery latency, Arbitrum or Optimism?

On the Fastest Chainlink CCIP source chain by end-to-end delivery latency benchmark, Optimism leads at 17.5 min versus Arbitrum at 19.0 min. Live measurement is updated continuously by the OpenChainBench harness.

How is the Arbitrum vs Optimism comparison measured?

Every benchmark on this page uses the same open methodology, published at https://openchainbench.com/methodology. Data is CC-BY-4.0. Measurement harnesses are MIT-licensed.

How this pair was selected

A pair is published when all four conditions hold. Both providers run in the same OpenChainBench benchmark for at least seven consecutive days. Each provider has at least 1000 samples in the measurement window. The head to head query has observable third party search demand. Both providers have a public /products/[slug] page on OCB. The full pair ledger is versioned in the public repo so the methodology is externally verifiable.

Live data refreshes via ISR within 60 seconds of a new run. Sources are the same Prometheus queries surfaced on the parent benchmark pages.