# L2BEAT

Ethereum L2 metrics with the risk assessment behind them, MIT-licensed and free.

*https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/l2beat · On-chain Analytics Platforms*

## Facts

### At a glance

| Field | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Vendor | L2BEAT |
| Category | On-chain Analytics Platforms |
| Job | onchain_metrics |
| Website | https://l2beat.com |
| Pricing model | free |
| Free tier | true |
| Open source | true |
| Licence | MIT |
| Self-hosted | false |
| KYC required | false |
| Tested hands-on | false |
| Last updated | 2026-09-19 |

### Pricing

| Tier | USD | Period |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Website | 0 USD | month |

### Coverage

| Field | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Asset classes | spot, stablecoins |
| Chains | ethereum, base, arbitrum, polygon, multi |
| Venues | none |
| Data latency | delayed |
| Platforms | web |
| AI features | none |

### Interfaces

| Field | Value |
| --- | --- |
| API | true |
| Webhooks | false |
| Scripting | none |
| MCP server | false |
| Export | api |

### Capabilities

Yes: charting, onchain_data

No: screening, backtesting, automation, live_trading, paper_trading, portfolio_tracking, exchange_import, tax_reporting, alerts, news, wallet_tracking, derivatives_analytics

*Verified: pricing 2026-09-19; coverage 2026-09-19.*

## What it is

A curated metric set for Ethereum layer twos, published with the method attached. Five things are
tracked across roughly a hundred projects — value secured, activity, onchain costs, liveness, and
a risk assessment that ends in a Stage label — and the unusual part is not the metrics but that
the definition of each one is written down, the assumptions behind it are argued in public, and
the code that computes it is MIT-licensed in a repository anyone can read.

That matters more here than the category usually admits. Almost every headline number in on-chain
analytics is a definition rather than a measurement, and almost every vendor ships the number
without the definition. L2BEAT ships the argument: TVS is a sum of canonically bridged, externally
bridged and natively minted assets, and the FAQ explains at length why that differs from a TVL
figure elsewhere and why the metric was renamed when the scope changed. Activity is measured in
user operations per second rather than transactions, because an L2 transaction can bundle many
user actions and counting them equally would flatter whoever batches hardest. Costs are the fees
the L2 itself pays Ethereum to post data, proofs and state — explicitly not the fees a user pays —
split into calldata, blobs, compute and overhead.

The other half of the product is not a metric at all. Each tracked project has a hand-written
assessment of its state validation, data availability, sequencing and upgradeability, and a Stage
from 0 to 2 that says how far it has moved toward trust minimisation. That is an opinion, held by
a named organisation that argues it in public and takes pull requests against it — which is a
different kind of claim from a proprietary risk score, and the reason to use this rather than a
dashboard that puts a number in a box.

## Pricing

Free, in full, with no account. There is no signup, no login, no paid tier and nothing gated on
the website, which is the direct consequence of how it is funded: L2BEAT describes itself as a
public goods company and names Gitcoin, the Ethereum Foundation, private donors and investors, and
per-project grants from companies in the space. It is a Polish limited company based in Warsaw.

Read that funding model as the trade it is. Nothing is being sold to you, so nothing is being
withheld from you; and the organisation that assesses the projects is funded in part by grants
from the ecosystem those projects belong to. L2BEAT is explicit about being "vocal and
opinionated", and the defence it offers against the obvious conflict is the one that can actually
be checked — every assessment is a file in a public repository with a history.

## Data & coverage

Narrow on purpose. This is Ethereum layer twos and layer threes, and nothing else: no Solana, no
Bitcoin, no multi-chain comparison of the sort the rest of this category sells. Within that scope
the current summary counts 23 rollups, 4 validiums and optimiums, and 74 "others" — projects
tracked because they are credibly moving toward trust minimisation rather than because they have
arrived — securing $43.18 billion in total, of which rollups hold $33.82 billion.

Coverage is not uniform across the five metric families, and the difference is easy to miss.
Value secured, activity and data availability cover the full roster. **Costs and liveness cover
fewer** — 21 rollups, 3 validiums and optimiums and 51 others — because both depend on
identifying the project's own Ethereum transactions, which is work done per project. If you are
comparing cost per user operation across the ecosystem, you are comparing the subset that has been
instrumented.

The data availability section reaches beyond Ethereum, which the scaling section does not: it
tracks 5 public DA layers including Celestia, Avail and EigenDA plus 17 custom ones, with their
own risk columns for the DA layer and its bridge. Value-secured series move at six-hour
granularity.

There is no entity or address labelling here of any kind. What L2BEAT attributes is projects —
which contracts a rollup runs, who holds its upgrade keys, which actors are permissioned — and the
provenance of that is a file in the monorepo rather than a proprietary label set. It is the only
product in this category whose attribution layer can be read line by line, and the only one where
you can open a pull request when it is wrong.

## Integrations

The interface question has an awkward answer. A documented API exists — there is a Swagger UI at
`api.l2beat.com/docs` — but it is key-gated, and so is its own specification: requesting the
OpenAPI document returns 401 with "Unauthorized. Use apiKey query parameter with valid API key."
Nothing on the website, in the FAQ, in the repository README or in a search says how a key is
obtained, whether it costs anything, or what the limits are.

Separately, the website's own backing endpoints answer without authentication and return the same
series the charts draw. They are undocumented, appear nowhere in the published API surface, and
are an implementation detail of the frontend rather than an interface anyone has promised to keep
— which is exactly how a production dependency breaks quietly. If you need this data
programmatically and cannot get a key, the honest options are the repository or a scraper you
maintain yourself.

## Limitations

- **Ethereum only.** L2s and L3s that settle to Ethereum. Not a multi-chain analytics platform and
  not trying to be one.
- **The documented API is gated and undocumented in the ways that matter.** No published route to
  a key, no published price, no published rate limits, and a specification that itself answers
  401.
- **The unauthenticated endpoints are not a published interface.** They work today; nothing says
  they will work tomorrow, and nothing says what the terms of using them are.
- **Costs and liveness cover about three quarters of the roster**, not all of it.
- **Stages and risk assessments are judgements**, held by a funded organisation, updated by hand.
  That is the product, and it is better documented than its competitors' — but it is not a
  measurement, and a project's stage can change because the assessment changed.
- **No alerting, no export controls, no account.** There is nothing to configure and nothing to
  save.
- **The terms of service say nothing about reusing the data.** Last updated 28 October 2024, they
  cover prohibited conduct — illegal activity, unauthorised access, abuse, market manipulation —
  and contain no redistribution, attribution or commercial-use clause in either direction. The MIT
  licence covers the code in the repository; it is a software licence and it does not address the
  hosted numbers. If you intend to republish L2BEAT figures commercially, that is a question to
  ask rather than a permission to infer.
- **The site can be discontinued without notice**, which the terms reserve explicitly. For a
  grant-funded public good that is a real line rather than boilerplate.

## Alternatives

Nothing else in this category does the same job. DefiLlama overlaps on value but measures
something different and says so, and the difference between the two numbers for the same chain is
a methodology gap rather than an error. A curated-metric platform with a business model will cover
more chains and answer more questions and will not show you how any of it is computed. The pairing
that actually works is L2BEAT for what secures a chain and what it costs the chain to be secured,
and an economics-oriented metric set for what the chain earns — read side by side, with the
knowledge that the second one probably reads its stage labels from the first.

## FAQ

### Does L2BEAT have an API?

Yes, and it needs a key. A Swagger UI is published at api.l2beat.com/docs, but the specification itself answers 401 with "Unauthorized. Use apiKey query parameter with valid API key." Nothing found on the site says how a key is obtained or what it costs.

### Why does L2BEAT report a different number from DefiLlama for the same chain?

Because they measure different things, and L2BEAT says so. Its Total Value Secured sums canonically bridged, externally bridged and natively minted assets; DefiLlama's TVL counts assets actively engaged in dApps. Bridge an ETH to an L2 and L2BEAT counts it — DefiLlama does not until you use it.

### What does a Stage label mean?

It is L2BEAT's classification of how far a project has moved toward trust minimisation, from Stage 0 to Stage 2, alongside a per-project risk assessment of state validation, data availability, sequencing and upgradeability. Every assessment is a file in the public repository rather than a score you have to take on faith.

### Why is L2BEAT's activity number lower than the chain's own transaction count?

Because it counts user operations per second rather than raw transactions, so a batch that bundles many user actions is not one transaction's worth of activity. The comparison it exists to support is L2 against L2 and against Ethereum, which is why the page also prints a scaling factor.

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- [CryptoQuant](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/cryptoquant.md) — Exchange reserves, miner flows and MVRV for four chains, as charts, alerts and an API.
- [Glassnode](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/glassnode.md) — A curated metric set in a charting studio, with the API on a separate annual plan.
- [growthepie](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/growthepie.md) — Ethereum L2 economics, CC BY licensed, on an API with no key — and chains pay for depth.
- [SanAPI](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/sanapi.md) — The GraphQL API under Sanbase, sold on its own plans with its own call budget.
- [Santiment](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/santiment.md) — On-chain, social and developer metrics for a few thousand assets, on one set of axes.