Boba Network is a multichain, optimistic rollup, Layer-2 scaling solution. Boba is live on Ethereum, Moonbeam, Avalanche, BNB, and Fantom.
Boba’s main focus is on gaming, NFTs, and metaverse via Hybrid Compute. Hybrid Compute is a key feature that allows developers to leverage existing Web2 tooling for more powerful computation and data usage.
Boba’s market cap rose by 49% in Q1.
Boba Ethereum hosts 58% of unique contract calls on Boba Network, despite having proportionally fewer users and activity.
Boba BNB leads activity across Boba implementations in Q1 with 225 average daily active addresses and 7,700 average daily transactions. New protocols such as ROVI Network are driving this activity.
Primer on Boba Network
Boba Network is a Layer-2 multichain scaling solution with a focus on gaming. Boba operates on Ethereum, Moonbeam, Avalanche, BNB, and Fantom, and it is maintained by Enya Labs. As an optimistic rollup (OR) based on Optimism’s codebase, Boba offers:
Reduced gas fees
Increased transaction throughput
L1 security guarantees
EVM compatibility for smart contracts, such as NFTs and decentralized finance (DeFi)
This network also has unique features that set it apart from other ORs and Optimism forks:
Hybrid Compute — the ability to connect to off-chain computational resources, data, and APIs
Multichain focus
Fast exit bridging to L1
DAO governance
Boba’s combination of features — specifically Hybrid Compute — enables decentralized applications (dapps) to:
run at a fraction of the cost of L1 dapps
leverage off-chain computation via Web2 APIs, and
provide the multichain solutions needed for blockchain gaming.
Key Metrics
The quantitative data in this report focuses on the Ethereum implementation of Boba Network unless stated otherwise. Data from Boba Avax, Boba BNB, and Bobabeam (Moonbeam) is labeled as such. There is no data available for Bobaopera (Fantom) in this report.
Performance Analysis
Network Overview
Boba Ethereum slightly decreased in terms of average daily active addresses, from 67 to 65. Average daily transactions, on the other hand, took a 28% decline QoQ. Despite the decreased activity on Boba Ethereum, the combined activity of Boba on Ethereum, BNB, Avalanche, and Moonbeam grew. Average daily average addresses across all implementations also grew considerably, with a 132% increase from 146 to 339.
The average transaction fee across Boba Network has decreased almost 10x from Q3 2022 to Q1 2023, from $0.24 to $0.025. This is primarily due to increased activity dominance by Boba BNB, Boba Avax, and Bobabeam, which have lower transaction fees than Boba Ethereum, benefitting from lower fees on their respective base L1s.
While Bobabeam had the highest activity in Q4 2022, Boba BNB took the lead in Q1 2023 in terms of active addresses and transactions. With the shift in transaction dominance, the overall number of daily transactions increased 4% from 13,409 to 13,940.
Boba BNB was the only implementation to see increased users in Q1. Average daily active addresses shot up over 5,000% from 4 to 208. With that increase, Boba BNB averaged nearly double the daily active addresses that Boba Ethereum, Boba Avax, and Bobabeam averaged combined. Bobabeam saw the most significant decline in activity in Q1, with average daily transactions dropping by ~54% from ~11,700 to ~5,500.
Boba BNB’s address activity spiked in mid-February after the launch of Megaworld, a metaverse strategy game. When the game had downtimes, Boba BNB’s activity experienced sharp drops in activity. Some address activity also came from ROVI Network, an infrastructure and consumer platform service. It enables gasless transactions for messaging, payments, and gaming.
Notably, addresses affiliated with ROVI Network are not proportional to transaction activity. ROVI Network provides its gasless experience for users by executing transactions through a forwarder contract. Because this forwarder contract executes on the behalf of users, network address activity does not scale with increased ROVI user activity.
Boba Ethereum saw a sharp uptick in activity at the end of Q1, as daily transactions quadrupled from ~50 to nearly 200 per day.
Towards the end of Q1, Boba BNB reached its peak with more than 40,000 daily transactions. ROVI Network launched on February 23 and is responsible for the majority of Boba BNB transactions. Boba BNB was responsible for over 95% of total transactions, or 30,000-40,000 transactions during the second half of March.
The other three implementations (Boba Ethereum, Boba Avax, and Bobabeam) combined for 1,000 daily transactions at the end of the quarter. Notably, transactions on Boba BNB peaked in March, while active wallets stayed at the same levels seen in February. These numbers indicate that active addresses were executing significantly more transactions at the end of the quarter rather than transaction activity being driven by new addresses.
Transaction fees became cheaper as user activity increased on the Ethereum and BNB implementations. Because L1 fees are incurred from batches being posted to the L1, optimal L2 transaction fees only occur when blocks are full with transactions. Boba Network claims to have transaction fees up to 100x cheaper than L1s, which is potentially the case in a time of sustained high activity.
Financial Overview
Boba’s market cap rose by 49% in Q1, aligning with market leaders such as Ethereum and Bitcoin. Boba’s success is likely due in part to its first adoption on the four new alt implementations which launched in late Q3 2022. Increased activity on the network pushed quarterly revenue denominated in USD up 37.1% from $11,500 to $15,800. Revenue is calculated as total L2 fees minus L1 sequencer fees.
Boba’s market cap was briefly up almost 100% from the start of January. However, it took a heavy dip in early March, when USDC depegged and the global banking sector began experiencing headwinds.
Ecosystem Overview
Boba’s combined TVL was steady through Q1. While TVL decreased on Boba Ethereum, Boba BNB and Boba Avax saw their first DEXs — Symbiosis and SushiSwap — gain some liquidity to bring the total back over $4 million. Boba BNB and Boba Avax only combined for $400,000 in liquidity. It should be noted that their focus is on gaming and not DeFi, just as it is with the original Boba Ethereum.
SushiSwap has 38% dominance over the entire DeFi ecosystem across Boba Ethereum, Boba BNB, and Boba Avax. This is largely due to SushiSwap’s 42% dominance on Boba Ethereum, which accounts for 90% of total Boba Network TVL. SushiSwap is the top dapp by TVL on Boba Avax and Boba BNB, with 82% and 58% dominance, respectively.
While Boba Ethereum lost dominance in terms of daily active addresses, its established ecosystem dating back to 2021 has many more dapps and contracts for users to interact with than Boba BNB, Boba Avax, or Bobabeam do. This relationship may explain the disproportionate 58% dominance of unique contracts on Boba Ethereum called in March 2023.
Boba BNB is responsible for the majority of daily unique contract callers (70% dominance) and total contract calls (96% dominance) in March 2023. Unique contract callers, as detailed in the Network Activity section for daily active addresses, is driven by both MegaWorld and ROVI Network. Because ROVI Network’s forwarder executes transactions on behalf of users that transact gaslessly, it barely affects the unique contract callers metric.
Activity spikes in the number of unique callers did not proportionally affect total contract calls and vice versa. It follows that March’s major increase in total contract calls (from ~10,000 to ~35,000 per day) came from the same addresses becoming more active, specifically ROVI Network’s forwarder contract. The forwarder contract alone executed nearly 300,000 transactions in March.
ROVI Network
ROVI Network is a multi-purpose infrastructure app driving the majority of transaction activity on Boba BNB and the Boba Network as a whole. ROVI offers a social recovery wallet, an on/off ramp, and gasless transactions to create a familiar UX for both Web3 and Web2 users. Its token, which has 11,000 holders, is used for rewards and staking.
ROVI integrates crypto through several pieces of infrastructure.
Messaging, such as with existing platforms WhatsApp and Telegram, via Keyboard91.
Financial services, such as payments, trading crypto, and earning yield on stables, via M91 Super App.
Boba Network’s focus on gaming and metaverse has a measurable effect on ecosystem activity. After launching in Q1, MegaWorld significantly increased activity metrics on Boba BNB.
Katana Inu is a player-versus-player (PvP) battle royale game that incorporates NFTs and fungible tokens. It announced its partnership with Boba Network in March. Homie Warsannounced its beta game and mobile application, which will launch in early Q2 2023.
Cosmic Universe crossed 1,500 NFTs minted on Boba Avax. Many games in development on Boba Network, such as EvoVerses and Katana Inu, will also include NFTs. Boba will likely experience more NFT activity as games approach their respective mainnets.
Yeti Swap, an NFT marketplace originally on Avalanche, deployed an instance on Boba Ethereum. While this marketplace has only facilitated a few swaps so far, it’s yet another example of Boba benefitting from existing in multiple L1 ecosystems.
DeFi
SushiSwap and Symbiosis Finance’s combined TVL on Boba Avax and Boba BNB increased 8x from $50,000 to $400,000 QoQ. Although DEXs and DeFi tools are not an onboarding priority for a gaming ecosystem, they are still complementary services to almost any dapp or game.
Symbiosis is a DEX and bridge native to Boba Network. Symbiosis supports bridging across the various Boba implementations. Symbiosis has also been the second-leading cross-chain provider on Rubic.exchange. Rubic is a cross-chain aggregator for users and dapps, with broad support for optimistic rollups. Together, Symbiosis, Rubic, and Boba Network will be airdropping Galxe NFTs to Symbiosis users on Boba in early Q2.
Qualitative Analysis
Key Events and Catalysts
Noteworthy events from Q1 include:
Boba Network sponsored the L2 Accelerator, an eight-week program focused on supporting Layer-2 projects by Encode Club. The program — also sponsored by zkSync, Metis, and AltLayer — began on February 21 and will run through April.
A Uniswap proposal was passed to deploy Uniswap V3 to Boba Ethereum because Uniswap V2 already existed on Boba.
The BOBA token became available to exchange on ChangeNOW’s non-custodial NOW Wallet.
Multichain Approach
Boba Network’s current state of five chains has proved attractive for game developers, and it has not announced plans to extend to other chains. Katanu Inu specifically cited Boba Network’s chain agnosticism as a contributing factor to the decision to partner with and build on Boba.
As newer implementations see more activity, they also receive adoption from ecosystem tools. Covalent and DefiLlama now support Boba BNB and Boba Avax, in addition to Boba Ethereum, which they’ve supported its launch in 2021.
Hybrid Compute and Gaming
Boba Network aims to be the leading solution for gaming and metaverse applications via its Hybrid Compute feature. This feature is intended to solve the problem of closed-off blockchain ecosystems. As it stands, blockchains cannot use any data or compute from outside of their ecosystem without an API or oracle. With Hybrid Compute, blockchain developers would be able to:
Create advanced algorithms that are typically too expensive to run on-chain.
Get millisecond response times.
Generate random numbers and other resources that typically carry security concerns in in decentralized computational environments.
Access low-cost storage, image, and audio processing.
With Hybrid Compute, developers can leverage legacy Web2 systems and solutions to build higher-quality blockchain games. For example, Boba Avax adopted Avalanche games such as Metaforra, Cosmic Universe, and EvoVerses, which can now leverage off-chain compute and Web2 APIs.
The Layer-2 Landscape
Ethereum L2s in general (specifically optimistic rollups) continue to gain adoption. Optimism, the project which Boba’s code is forked from, has made more contributions to its OP Stack, which benefits all users of the technology. Arbitrum, another project based on Optimism’s codebase, has seen massive adoption and even surpassed Ethereum mainnet in daily transactions several times in Q1. Base, a new L2 from Coinbase, launched its testnet in Q1 and is also based on the OP Stack.
Boba Network will benefit from compatible tooling from these adjacent ecosystems, as building with the same technology is a positive-sum game. The greater ecosystem will even benefit from the adoption of L2s that use zero-knowledge proofs or off-chain data as they push UX in multiple directions, such as developments in account abstraction from zkSync and StarkNet.
Most other L2s are general-purpose protocols, but Boba Network remains steadily focused on gaming and metaverse. There are, however, a few L2s that directly compete with Boba for the use case of gaming, such as ImmutableX, built on StarkEx, with over 100 games building on it. The key differentiators between Boba and ImmutableX, or any L2 built with StarkEx, are as follows:
Boba stores its data on L1, which is more secure but more expensive.
Boba uses fraud proofs, which will always be faster than zero-knowledge proofs regardless of future hardware or circuit advancements.
Roadmap
Enya Labs and the Boba Network community continue to explore parallel execution, as all five Boba implementations live on L1s with account-based accounting models. As it stands, this setup may lead to scalability bottlenecks of having to serialize all transactions. Achieving parallel execution of transactions would allow for a drastically higher transactions per second (TPS). However, implementing this design feature would require Boba to move away from the EVM.
Boba Network continues to explore account abstraction, along with several other L2s and Ethereum mainnet. Abstracting child accounts from a single main account allows the main account to separately perform actions such as paying fees for its derived contract accounts. Within gaming, this allows for a smoother UX as the user doesn’t have to pay gas fees at every step. In fact, the protocol could completely subsidize these fees without involving the user at all.
Closing Summary
Q1 featured Boba Network’s new implementations as they saw their first real adoption, overtaking Boba Ethereum in activity metrics. It also saw games move along in their development cycles. While Bobabeam led in some early activity, Boba BNB stole the show midway through the quarter when ROVI Network launched. The vast majority of address activity, transactions, and contract calls came from Boba BNB in Q1.
Many other games are still being developed, with some such as Homie Wars aiming for launches in Q2. More games reaching mainnet will potentially lead to activity spikes similar to the one on Boba BNB during Q1.
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Red is a researcher, educator, and developer in the web3 space. Red's background is in electrical and software engineering. His main interest is privacy technology, through zero-knowledge proofs and general cryptography.
Red is a researcher, educator, and developer in the web3 space. Red's background is in electrical and software engineering. His main interest is privacy technology, through zero-knowledge proofs and general cryptography.
