The imminent release of the Ethereum Dencun upgrade at 14:00 UTC today, March 13th, has seen a notable spike in the prices of native tokens for layer 2 protocols including Arbitrum, Polygon, and Optimism.
According to CryptoSlate’s According to the data, the sector has surged around 5% in the last 24 hours, reaching a total market capitalization of $20.21 billion. This growth maintains the consistent upward trend of 10% observed throughout the week.
Layer 2 Token Increase
In the past 24 hours, Arbitrum’s ARB token has surged about 10%, reaching $2.18. This surge coincides with the team’s plans to launch over $1 billion worth of ARB tokens this week.
According to L2Beat, Arbitrum is the leading layer 2 Ethereum scaling solution with approximately $16 billion worth of assets locked on the platform.
During the same period, the MATIC token on the Polygon network rose 4% to $1.23, its highest since March 2023. This upward trend coincides with a notable increase in active addresses on the Polygon PoS chain, reaching over 1 million per day. This address has been active for 20 consecutive days.
Likewise, Optimism’s OP token rose 2.26% to $4.5, according to CryptoSlate data. This is an important milestone considering the starting point of around $3.50 earlier this month.
Notably, the Optimism Foundation announced a private sale of 19.5 million OP tokens last week. The buyer is not disclosed, but the contract includes a two-year vesting period.
Lastly, Loopring’s LRC has experienced a modest rise of 1.34% over the same reporting period and is currently trading at $0.43140 at press time.
Why are they rising?
The token’s price surge is due to the Dencun upgrade, which is scheduled to be released in the coming hours.
Dencun aims to significantly improve Ethereum’s network scalability. The integration of EIP-4844, known as proto-dank sharding, lowers transaction costs on layer 2 chains by introducing blob-type transactions. This move minimizes data availability costs while enabling massive scale through layer 2 rollup.
Mara Schmiedt, CEO of Alluvial Finance, said: CryptoSlate The Dencun upgrade represents a major leap forward in Ethereum’s ecosystem resilience and performance.
According to her:
“The combination of Ethereum’s rollup-centric scalability model, the upcoming Dencun upgrade, and the rapid proliferation of L2 and transaction growth points to an optimistic future.”