OpenChainBench

Ethereum vs Optimism

Ethereum leads on 3 of 5 shared benchmarks, Optimism on 2. Ethereum wins on Fastest Wormhole VAA finalization by source chain, live latency (13.7 min vs 17.5 min), Fastest Chainlink CCIP source chain by end-to-end delivery latency (16.5 min vs 20.0 min), Fastest Axelar GMP source chain by end-to-end delivery (17.2 min vs 25.0 min). Optimism wins on Cheapest blockchain transaction fee, live across L1 and L2 chains ($0.0000130 vs $0.0304), Fastest LayerZero source chain by end-to-end message delivery (1.4 min vs 4.1 min). Data as of 2026-10-06 UTC.

Read methodology Last measured Window: rolling 24h6 shared benchmarks, 5 measured on both sides
Ethereum logo
Ethereum

PoS chain using Gasper (Casper FFG plus LMD-GHOST). 12-second slots with deterministic finality every two epochs, roughly 12.8 minutes.

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

Stablecoin flow by chain: where dollars actually moved over 30 days

Blockchains
Provider30d changeStablecoin floatNet 7d7d change
Ethereum-$147.29B$122.65M0.083%
Optimism16.9%$577.03M$14.40M2.56%
View
Ethereumn/aOptimismn/a

Stablecoin float is where dollars are parked, not what they do. A chain can take in a billion that sits idle, and lose float to a single issuer redeeming. The figure is DefiLlama's chain-wide pegged-USD aggregate, every issuer combined; it does not separate a bridge inflow from a native mint, and a dollar bridged to an L2 counts on both chains, so rows are not additive. Read the net dollars with the percentage beside them: the same $400M is a rounding error on Ethereum and a doubling elsewhere.

Rolling 24h · Net stablecoin flow (30d)Raw JSON

Frequently asked questions

Ethereum vs Optimism: which one is better?

Ethereum and Optimism are compared on 6 shared OpenChainBench benchmarks. Ethereum leads on Fastest Wormhole VAA finalization by source chain, live latency. Optimism leads on Cheapest blockchain transaction fee, live across L1 and L2 chains. See the live table on this page for every metric.

Which is faster, Ethereum or Optimism?

On the Fastest Wormhole VAA finalization by source chain, live latency benchmark, Ethereum leads at 13.7 min versus Optimism at 17.5 min (provisional). Live measurement is updated continuously by the OpenChainBench harness.

Which is cheaper, Ethereum or Optimism?

On the Cheapest blockchain transaction fee, live across L1 and L2 chains benchmark, Optimism leads at $0.0000130 versus Ethereum at $0.0304. Live measurement is updated continuously by the OpenChainBench harness.

How is the Ethereum 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.

Related comparisons

How this pair was selected

Auto-generated pairs require: both providers in the same benchmark for seven consecutive days, at least 1000 samples per provider, observable third-party search demand, and a public /products/[slug] page on OCB. Editorially curated pairs (like this one) may publish early when search demand is high and data is accruing; panels with fewer than 100 samples are shown as provisional. The full pair ledger is versioned in the public repo.

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