📝 Editor’s Note:

Welcome to the second installment of OurNetwork's two-part series covering Layer 2s. In this issue we have Oğuz covering Starknet, peter covering Polygon, Philipp covering BOB, and TheLaughingMan covering Katana.

Let's get into it.

– ON Editorial Team

Starknet | Polygon | BOB | Katana

• Starknet’s total value locked (TVL) peaked at $1.53B in March 2024 but since then has been bleeding, falling to levels of $410M, driven by net outflows in wstETH (-$5.4M in Dec 2024) and USDC (-$15.4M in June 2025). STRK token inflows were primarily token unlocks rather than new capital. TVL declined however, suggesting capital rotation rather than sustained growth. Stablecoin withdrawals and ETH outflows indicate real capital leaving the platform.

• The number of unique users has been declining even more than TVL since the STRK airdrop, which happened on Feb. 19, 2024. However, growing rumors about the criteria for the second airdrop have renewed interest in Starknet, especially among early users who missed out on the first airdrop.

• Despite a ~73% drop in TVL since March 2024, volume remained active—especially for STRK and ETH. Usage didn’t always decline with TVL, showing periods of decoupling. Stablecoin outflows, however, aligned more closely with falling TVL.

• Polygon is the leading Ethereum-based payments chain. In June, it had 2.6M active USDC senders, making up 29% of the market. The network processed $107M across 3.39M micropayments ($0.50 to $100), capturing 52% of the total onchain micropayments market. That’s more than Solana, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Avalanche C and Gnosis combined. When it comes to being the Venmo of crypto, Polygon leads the market.

• Polygon is number one in small payments ($100–$1,000), growing by 37% to claim 42% market share. In medium payments ($1,000–$10,000), the network rose 15% to $932M, narrowing the gap with leaders Ethereum and Solana by 2% and 4%. While other chains declined, Polygon grew in both segments in June.

• Polygon’s payment infrastructure stands out for being one of the cheapest ways to transfer stablecoins like USDC. As of the end of June, sending USDC on Polygon cost just one-twentieth of a cent. That's at least five times cheaper than most other chains.

• Thanks to BOB's hybrid approach, BOB has gained significant traction and has established itself as the leading chain for BTCFi. With more than $200M in total value secured, BOB has been ranked among the top Layer 2 blockchains across DeFiLlama and L2beat since its inception more than a year ago. The growth and consistency of these metrics prove that BOB has already established itself as a leading BTCFi platform.

• With a strong focus on yield generation for Bitcoin holders, BOB has attracted top tier projects such as Uniswap, Aave, Euler, Solv, Lombard and others, positioning BOB as the best place to earn yield on BTC. This has led BOB to attract more than 500k users actively participating in the ecosystem.

• The user adoption and activity is also reflected in BOB’s sequencer revenue. With more than a million USD of revenue generated over the last 12 months, BOB quickly became one of the most profitable L2s while maintaining a cheap and fast execution environment for users and projects alike.

• Katana is a DeFi-focused L2 aiming to solve liquidity fragmentation and provide real and optimized yield. Instead of having multiple dApps protocols per sector on the same chain, Katana has 1 core protocol per sector. For example Morpho accounts for lending and SushiSwap is for trading. The chain is currently already past $200M TVL (with quite a bit of the pre-deposits yet to migrate!). This puts it head to head with older DeFi-focused chains like Mantle. Plenty of incentives in play!

• The chain has been pushing >100K transactions since the official mainnet launch. However, the daily unique wallets appear to be low in proportion. Given the amount of spotlight and the hype around the launch, one would expect a lot more adventurous wallets on the lookout for yield.

• Ignoring the low DAUs, unique wallets since the inception of the chain seem to be absurdly low as well for a launch that is backed by giants like Polygon Labs and GSR.io. Part of this could be due to not-so-simple incentives and yield, which encompass a layered a variety of risks.