TL;DR: With a new update or project being released almost every day, it’s clear the crypto ecosystem is constantly evolving. Arbitrum has gone through a lot of ups and downs to reach the level it’s at today — but it’s just the beginning. Knowing what brought it here and why it was created will lead you to make better decisions when investing or simply using Arbitrum.
In this article, we’re gonna dive into the Arbitrum ecosystem, answer all the $ARB related questions and even more. Prepare yourself for a history lesson and a journey to the future of Arbitrum!
What is Arbitrum (ARB)?
Arbitrum is a Layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum created in 2019.
You may wonder why does Ethereum need a second layer in order to scale. Why don’t they apply scaling at the base layer right from the start?
To answer this question we need to refer to the blockchain trilemma — a formalized idea that every blockchain design is faced with three challenges: scaling, security and decentralization.
Scaling refers to the number of transactions a blockchain can process. Security refers to the ability of a blockchain to withstand a 51% attack and it’s tied to the distribution of nodes either geographically, or in number.
Decentralization is the central ethos of blockchain tech, and drives projects to eliminate third parties. Participants in a decentralized networks reach consensus without having to trust each other. This results in a blockchain resilient to monopolies that can’t be controlled nor censored.
Most blockchains can only accomplish two out of the three qualities, which is why so many networks have come up with their own implementations. Naturally, each network has its own strengths and weaknesses depending on their design. For example, Solana has sacrificed on decentralization in order to scale.
Ethereum took a different route and settled for security and decentralization from the beginning. If you’ve used Ethereum for the past years, you may have noticed that transaction fees are less accessible when the network demand rises. This means users are bidding up in order to have their transaction included in a block.
With 15 transactions per second, Ethereum can only go so far before it prices participants out of the market. This is where Arbitrum comes in!
Arbitrum is an optimistic rollup that “rolls up” batches transactions into a single transaction. The benefit of rollups is that batched transactions are all confirmed on a single transaction. As a result, Ethereum can scale way beyond its limitations.
Optimistic rollups use a specific technique to batch transactions. They assume all transactions submitted are valid until proven wrong. If the statement is true, the transactions are finalized on the Ethereum chain, hence the “optimistic” name.
It is possible to contest a transaction through a dispute resolution mechanism. If one party suspects fraudulent behavior from the validator, they have a time window (called a challenge period) during which they can challenge the rollup transaction.
If the fraud proof is valid, the protocol re-executed the transaction and updates the rollup’s state accordingly. The other effect is that the validator (called sequencer) that executed the transaction incorrectly receives a penalty. The layer 2 terminology is used to differentiate the scaling solution from the main chain (Ethereum). As mentioned before, Arbitrum validators are called sequences.
The Arbitrum sequencer is a node that is responsible for submitting users’ transactions onto the L2. A sequencer is fundamentally different from the layer 1 — it has its own set of validators, and it can’t derive security directly from layer 1. This brings the question of how Arbitrum can claim its censorship resistance if/when a sequencer misbehaves.
Arbitrum has been designed to have an “escape hatch” in case the network fails for whatever reason to submit a transaction. In this situation, the user can submit their L2 message via L1 to “the delayed Inbox.” The delayed inbox is a name for the transactions that wait before being moved over to the Inbox. Once a message has spent enough time in the delayed inbox, users can request for the message to be included in the main Inbox.
Crucially, anyone can use this command to call the contract. An attacker can go as far as to post his messages in front. However, there’s ultimately nothing the attacker can do to prevent the message from being included in the Inbox, at which point the transaction is submitted to the main chain.
If we were to summarize the lifecycle of an Arbitrum transaction it would look something like this: Sequencer receives transaction —> Sequencer orders transaction (off-chain) —> Sequencer posts transaction in a batch (on-chain). At the end of the cycle, the transaction is finalized on the Ethereum network.
Finality is achieved when a block has been created and is now immutable, meaning that nobody can change the date inside. An important consideration for the team when building Arbitrum was compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
The EVM is a concept introduced by Ethereum and represents an environment where dapps can run. For example, the EVM allows for a blockchain to process more than simple token transfers. The EVM compatibility means any code written on Ethereum works out of the box on Arbitrum. This represents a huge advantage for both the rollup and the main chain. Popular Dapps can easily expand to a rollup and enable smaller fees for users. In turn, the main chain attracts more users and grows faster.
This brings us to the sweet part about rollups: the fees. Being able to batch multiple transactions in a single transaction means the gas cost is split among multiple users. As a result, Arbitrum transactions are estimated to cost 1/10 or less of what they would cost on the Ethereum main chain. On May 2022, the Arbitrum transactions had a high of $4.57 an a low of $0.42.
Another aspect where Arbitrum helps Ethereum scale is in terms of transaction throughput. In the beginning of the year, Arbitrum was able to process anywhere from 500 to 4,500 TPS. The team decided to limit Arbitrum’s true scaling potential, which is said to reach 40,000 TPS. It was a safety measure to ensure the sequencers can consistently process transactions before raising the throughput.
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When was Arbitrum (ARB) created?
Arbitrum (ARB) was conceptualized at Princeton University by Edward Felten and two graduate students. Work began on the Arbitrum network in 2018, but before that, a couple of important events happened.
In an interesting twist of events, the technology for Arbitrum dates back from 2014. It started out as an independent study class at Princeton University. Harry Kalodner, one of the co-founders, then came up with “Arbitrum” as a suggestion for a class project.
In his own words: “the idea looked a bit different. There are definitely differences from where [Arbitrum] is today. But the coolest thing is you can go on YouTube and if you search for Arbitrum, you’ll see a video from 2015 which was the report that that team did at the end of the semester.”
In the video, three shy students explained the concept of trust-minimized smart contract computation. The project was about a blockchain-based arbitration system, hence the name “Arbitrum.” In simpler terms, the idea was to create smart contract that would enforce itself. In order to create a trustless system where participants are able to transact freely, there had to be an arbitration system to settle disputes.
In 2015, Ethereum was already on the path to release its mainnet and enable smart contract functionality. The team took note of their efforts and was seeking to improve the network by adding scalability. With Ethereum, the challenge was that all scripts had to be run and verified by each node in order to be validated. As more smart contracts were created, the network would become bulkier and slower. This was an obvious bottleneck in terms of scalability.
Arbitrum solves this challenge by posting a proof that the transaction was made on the blockchain, as opposed to making the entire computation on the blockchain. The team created a separated sandbox called Virtual Machine (VM), where transactions would be processed before posting the proof on the main chain. If all parties agreed on the outcome of the transaction, then the proof is posted on the main chain.
In case of a dispute, users had a time window to challenge the transaction and ensure the correct outcome is posted on the main chain. The end result was a Layer-2 with scalability and security features.
As mentioned before, scalability is ensured by posting only the proof of the transaction on the main chain. The added bonus was that Arbitrum involved a less energy intensive mechanism to verify transactions.
Security is possible thanks to the arbitration mechanism inside the Arbitrum VM. It was an idea ahead of its time, but Edward Felten was already on it.
Ed Felten already had the concept of a layer-2 back in 2014. For most of the year, he had a diagram on the whiteboard in his office at Princeton that described the steps. Six students drew inspirations from Felten’s diagram and created the proof of concept.
On the fall of 2014, one of his colleagues started writing an entire course on blockchain tech, where all students had to create a project. Shortly after the presentation, Ed left Princeton to join the White House as the Deputy CTO. The project dropped during his absence. By the time he returned at Princeton, the Ethereum team was thinking about ETH 2.0, but the effort was too much.
The network became overburdened with transactions from CryptoKitties, and the need for a solution was imminent. Felten said Ethereum’s scaling abilities haven’t improved dramatically since then, which created an opportunity for Offchain Labs to apply their solution.
The initial idea for Abritrum happened before the Ethereum mainnet, so the design was agnostic, presuming that it will later run on the Ethereum network. Felten said that Ethereum was an obvious choice for several reasons: it has the most developers and users, it has smart contracts, and they really liked the Ethereum community. All thee factors made them think that Arbitrum will have a chance to thrive on the Ethereum network.
In late 2017, the team had started working on a research paper. It was more of an academic pursuit, so they didn’t really think of starting a company. The next step of choosing to start a company came as Arbitrum was on its way to become a commercial product.
The revival of Arbitrum happened in 2018, when Felten and two graduate students who worked on the projects co-founded Offchain Labs. The team didn’t have any entrepreneurial background, but they were fortunate to have funding from Pantera Capital early on. This financial cushion helped them focus on developing Arbitrum.
Who created Arbitrum (ARB)?
Arbitrum was developed in 2018 by a team who later spun out into Offchain Labs. The company was founded by Edward Felten, Steven Goldfeder, and Harry Kalodner in 2018.
Edward Felten finished his college studies at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1985. He graduated with a bachelor degree in Physics. For three years, he worked as a staff programmer at Caltech. His work was on a supercomputer project at the Institute.
Felten then enrolled as a graduate student in Computer Science at the University of Washington. He graduated with a Master of Science degree in 1991 and a PhD in 1993. His PhD thesis was on developing an automated protocol for communication between parallel processors.
In 1993, he joined the Princeton University as an Assistant Professor, where he would spend more than a decade teaching. By 2003, he was to promoted to Professor, and stayed in that position for another 3 years before joining the Woodrow Wilson School of Public International Affairs. In 2005, he became the Director of the Center for Information and Technology Policy at Princeton.
Besides his academic career, Felten has served as consultant at law firms, corporations and government agencies. His research involves computer security and technology policy. The diverse work environment had helped Felted get appointed as the Chief Technologist at the Federal Trade Commission. Felten’s main role was to provide advice on technology policy issues. After being appointed, he took a one-year leave of absence from Princeton University.
In 2013, Felton was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to security of computer systems, and for impact on public policy. In 2015, Ed Felten was joining the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer. He served at the White House during Obama’s term for one year. In his new role, Felten worked under U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith to advise the president and his staff on policy issues.
By then, Ed had published more than 100 papers and two books on technology law and policy. During his time at the White House, Felten advised the president on blockchain policy as well. His experience at the White House played an important role in designing Arbitrum upon his return at the Princeton University. He admitted that running Offchain Labs is a walk in the park compared to the stress he had while working as the CTO at the White House.
In 2021, Felten left the Princeton University to focus full-time on Offchain Labs. As mentioned previously, the idea of Arbitrum was developed by Edward Felten in collaboration with two Princeton graduate students, Steven Goldfeder, and Harry Kalodner.
Steven Goldfeder currently serves as the co-founder and CEO of Offchain Labs. He finished his college studies at Yeshiva University, earning a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Computer Science. In 2013, Steven enrolled in Princeton University where he earned his PhD in Computer Science.
In the beginning of his career, Steven spent 8 months as an intern at Google’s software engineering team, and another 4 months as a research intern at Microsoft. In his first days at Princeton, Steve’s advisor introduced him to the concept of Bitcoin. From that moment, Steve had focused his cryptography research at applications on cryptocurrency.
His early work was on securing digital assets using multi-party computation. The idea is to have multiple parties needed to cryptographically sign a transaction in order for it to get executed. Unlike traditional banking, the danger was for a transaction to fail to achieve finality. In this case, the transfer wouldn’t be recorded on the blockchain.
Steve’s PhD work would eventually become commercialized by other companies such as Fireblocks. During his PhD career, Steve and his colleagues co-authored a book on cryptography that is used in many universities today. Towards the end of his PhD, Steve got involved into Arbitrum, which was an academic project at the time.
The third piece of the Arbitrum team is Harry Kalodner, who currently serves as the CTO of Offchain Labs. Harry graduated Bowdoin College with a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Computer Science. Between 2007 and 2009, Harry was a Web Services Department Intern.
In 2011 he joined the Computer Science Summer Fellowship at Bowodoin College. His project was to work on a method to determine watershed over a terrain represented by a triangulated mesh.
For a brief 8 months, Harry was a software development intern at Apple, before starting his PhD at Princeton University in 2014. He was one of the few students who sticked to Arbitrum after Ed Felten left to work at the White House, and today he says it has his best decision ever.
How is the Arbitrum (ARB) token used?
The Arbitrum token is the native token for the Arbitrum network.
The first official mentions of an ARB token were made in 2022 as part of Arbitrum Odyssey, a multi-week initiative for exploring the Arbitrum ecosystem. Users have been expecting Arbitrum to launch their token after competitors like Optimism (OP) did the same.
On March 23, 2023, Arbitrum distributed its much anticipated ARB token, decentralizing its protocol in the hands of tens of thousands of users. For now, the ARB token is being used solely as a governance token and fees will continue to be paid in ETH.
Token holders have the option to delegate their tokens within the Arbitrum DAO. By delegating tokens, ARB holders give voting power to the appointed users.
“The [Arbitrum] DAO is not only going to control the direction of these two chains and their technology, it’s actually going to control the direction of the underlying technology as well,” Steven Goldfeder said.
Who is developing Arbitrum (ARB) now?
Development on Arbitrum started in 2018 by a team who later spun out into Offchain Labs. Currently, the team has more than 20 members working at developing Arbitrum.
Offchain is a company founded in 2018 that has its headquarters located in New York. Besides handling the development of the core protocol, it is also tasked with finding talents to further their mission of building scaling products for Ethereum.
On 31 August 2021, Offchain Labs announced an additional $120M fundraise leading to a valuation of $1.2 billion. At the time, it coincided with the hype of the Arbitrum One launch, which resulted in even more interest from developers. With newly raised funds from investors, Offchain Labs is eager to expand their team.
On their website, Offchain Labs is looking for a large palette of experienced developers to join their team. Open positions range from blockchain developers to researchers and community managers.
The codebase has been written entirely by the Offchain Labs, as they maintained quite a secretive approach during the initial stages. Early partners such as Chainlink and Uniswap were among the first to gain access to the code in order to test and integrate Arbitrum with their dapps. Furthermore, each release is licensed under a Business Source License, similar to Uniswap and Aave.
The purpose of this strategy is to delay against would-be copycats. Given that the license has an expiration date, it doesn’t go against the principles of open-source code and decentralization. With an “Additional Use Grant”, Offchain Labs allows anyone to use and run nodes on all public Arbitrum chains.
Open source contributors also play an important part in bringing Arbitrum to where it is today. With each release, the codebase would be made public via a devnet, where contributors can test the scaling solution for their dapp and come up with improvements.
The Offchain Labs team even created a tutorial with demos explaining how to interact with Arbitrum — deploying and using contracts directly on L2, moving ETH and tokens between L1 and L2, and more.
For convenience, the team created an Arbitrum SDK, as well as a dedicated portal for developers to learn about how Arbitrum works. As of 2022, Arbitrum’s GitHub repository lists more than 35 active contributors. Interestingly, Ed Felten is listed as the 4th biggest contributor. The first three contributors are also part of Offchain Labs team. The most popular repositories are for the Arbitrum (ARB) token bridge and Nitro.
The Arbitrum Constitution meticulously outlines the governance procedures and proposal handling within the Arbitrum ecosystem. Their DAO governance operates in a self-executing manner, granting direct power to execute on-chain decisions without intermediaries. This stands as a significant leap in decentralization, establishing Arbitrum as the pioneering L2 with self-executing governance. For thoughtful deliberation and user responsiveness to changes, proposals necessitate a minimum of 21–37 days for approval.
In urgent scenarios, like addressing vulnerabilities, rapid upgrades may be imperative. To address such emergencies promptly and maintain security, the Arbitrum Security Council was instituted, comprising 12 esteemed community representatives. In critical situations, this council can act swiftly, requiring the consensus of 9 out of the 12 members.
The ultimate authority over the Arbitrum Security Council lies with the Arbitrum DAO. Biannual elections will determine the Council's composition, and the DAO holds the authority to retire the Security Council if deemed unnecessary for chain protection.
What are the latest updates on Arbitrum (ARB)?
Arbitrum in 2019
2019 was the year where Arbitrum entered the crypto scene. The project had been conceptualized in late 2018, but the team hasn’t revealed details until one year later.
In 2019, the impact of the Ethereum fees was staring to be felt, and the need for a scaling solution was imminent.
Seeing the opportunity, Arbitrum was able to raise $3.9 million in seed funding from Compound VC and other contributors. At the time, Offchain Labs was focused on scaling smart contracts for enterprise use cases and gaming.
The problem with Ethereum scaling was formalized by Felton as follows: “The on-chain costs increase as the storage for your dapp gets bigger and the amount of code that needs to be executed gets bigger. This limits the complexity and sophistication of the games you can have.”
Arbitrum’s experimental approach would cut down the price one has to pay for smart contracts, with the security guarantees of Ethereum. Around the same year, other scaling implementations like the ones from Optimism and StarkWare were starting to emerge.
Offchain Labs was seeking to differentiate itself by offering the cheapest model. On April 15, the company introduced its first product: Arbitrum. The platform was compatible with Ethereum, it could reach 500 TPS, and it was fairly private — only the sequencers knew what was in the dapp’s code or storage.
The most interesting feature was the platform’s AnyTrust Guarantee, which ensures correct execution as long as one validator of the dapp is acting honestly. This was a major advantage compared to existing implementations that required two thirds of validators to be honest.
The Ethereum community rallied behind the idea as they supported each development phase. Expectations were that Arbitrum would end the gigantic ETH fees and the entire Ethereum ecosystem would move forward to new highs.
On September 11, Offchain Labs launched the alpha version of Arbitrum. On that occasion, the code was made open-source so that developers can start building their dapps at scale. The date coincided with a fresh funding round from Coinbase Ventures. Although the amount was undisclosed, the team said they will use the money to accelerate development and onboard more users.
Over the course of 2019, the team participated in ETH Boston and Devcon. These events were an opportunity for the team to showcase their product and to help crypto projects integrate Arbitrum to their dapps. Ed Felten occupied the main role of promoting Arbitrum while explaining its design in lengthy Medium posts.
Arbitrum in 2020
In the beginning of 2020, Offchain Labs was teasing the beta launch of Arbitrum. The project was slowly gaining more hype and the expectations were high.
On February 11, the Arbitrum rollups was live on testnet. The launch featured full smart contract support, high security, low gas fees, high throughput and censorship resistance. Te gates were open, and dozens of developers started building on Arbitrum. Moreover, the team was available to help with technical support on their Discord. Early projects that started integrating Arbitrum were Chainlink and Uniswap. The collaboration was announced at EthDenver.
In July, Arbitrum announced that they would participate in Reddit’s Scaling Bake-Off. For some time, Reddit was looking to integrate the Community Points to their platform. So the team thought about turning it into a challenge where projects would compete for the best implementation.
Many projects showed up, including OMG Network, xDai and Solana. Teams had until July 31 to present their solution before Reddit and the Ethereum Foundation. The winner would get 25,000 Dai, sponsored by the Maker Foundation. The Community Points would take the form of ERC-20 tokens, and the key areas of focus was to design a scaling solution that would enable cheap transfers.
Reddit's instructions specified the following minimum parameters that submissions should support: “over a 5-day period, the proof-of-concept must be able to handle at least 100,000 point claims, 25,000 subscriptions, 100,000 transfers, and 75,000 one-off points burnings.”
Some additional demands were required in order to qualify. The solution had to be decentralized and provide an easy user experience. It should also provide compatibility with outside apps, and Redditors must have complete ownership over the assets.
Although Arbitrum was still in testnet, the team took the challenge seriously and argued for their solution. The team said they had an internal version that could be able to handle the Reddit contracts. In addition, Reddit could run on Arbitrum Sidechains by having their own set of validators.
Out of 21 submissions, Arbitrum was crowned the winner of the Bake-Off Challenge held by Reddit. The scaling would be done for the two main tokens that were launched last year by Reddit – $MOONS and $BRICKS. Initially, Reddit would test the Layer-2 rollup on the Rinkeby testnet, before migrating to the Ethereum mainnet.
On November 5, Arbitrum launched its second version of the testnet. To showcase Abritrum's scaling capabilities, the team ported Uniswap. The result was Arbiswap, which was essentially Uniswap V2 running on Arbitrum’s Rollup testnet.
Arbiswap was capable of handling up to 390 transactions per second. For comparison, the Ethereum Layer 1 can handle, at absolute most, 7 Uniswap-swaps per second. The dapp also included a token bridge that facilitates transferring assets between Ethereum and the Arbitrum Rollup chain, and wallet support for MetaMask.
Arbitrum in 2021
2021 was the year of the Arbitrum One mainnet. September 1 represented the culmination of years of work, all in an effort to bring much-needed gas relief to the Ethereum network. On this date, the Offchain team opened up Arbitrum One for all users and projects simultaneously.
But even though the whitelist has been removed, that didn’t mean that every project could choose to go live immediately. The releases would be made gradually, and participants could see projects go live on the Arbitrum One Portal.
While the release represented a significant milestone, Arbitrum One was still in beta. The team would maintain the ability to do fast upgrades and even pause the system if necessary. It was a responsible measure from the team to ensure the network operates securely.
In the same spirit, transaction speed limit was capped at the same speed of the Ethereum mainnet. Their plan was to gradually increase the speed limit as the system stabilizes. On the good side, transactions on Arbitrum would be significantly cheaper than Ethereum L1, but the risk of congestion was still a possibility.
Arbitrum, like all Optimistic Rollups, has the characteristic that it takes roughly a week for withdrawals to be confirmed. While this is a user experience drawback, it gave confidence that the team can act in case of a security event. From this point on, users were able to bridge their assets over to Arbitrum. The action would require them to access the Arbitrum Portal, and keep some ETH for the transfer fees.
On the day of the launch, Offchain Labs announced that they’ve raised $120 million from Lightspeed, Pantera, Polychain, Redpoint, Ribbit and other VCs. Within 24 hours, over 800 ETH had been bridged over to Arbitrum, which equated to $2.9 million. In short, it was a spectacular success.
A couple weeks later, the TVL on Arbitrum skyrocketed to 600,000+ ETH, as users were flocking away from the Ethereum L1 fees. From day one, Arbitrum One became the biggest Ethereum rollup, overshadowing its main competitor, Optimism.
42 days after the Arbitrum One launched, Arbitrum unveiled the new product they’ve been working on: Arbitrum Nitro. Research for Arbitrum Nitro started out of the team’s curiosity for building a version of Arbitrum powered by the popular WebAssembly (WASM) architecture. The potential benefits were increased transaction speed and more compatibility with EVM. Over time, the project has evolved from a one-person research into a full team endeavor.
Arbitrum in 2022
2022 been a powerful one for Arbitrum. The network reached had an all-time high TVL of $2.4 billion, or 1,77 million ETH. Arbitrum was the talk of the town among the Ethereum community members, mainly because of an important upgrade.
On April 6, the team announced that Nitro is ready as its launch on the Görli testnet was imminent. The codebase has been made public and details on a seamless Arbitrum One integration have been released.
Offchain Labs described Arbitrum Nitro as the most advanced rollup ever built, with the capability of processing massively more transactions at a much lower fee.
Before Nitro, the Arbitrum fees were already 95% cheaper than on Ethereum, the upgrade cuts costs even further.
In order to kickstart a new era Ethereum scaling, the team had to migrate Arbitrum One over to Nitro. At the time of the announcement, Nitro was still a proof-of-concept. Making the transition would require the cumulative effort of the core team and the contributors.
If there’s one technical thing to remember about Nitro is that the L2 Arbitrum engine can be written and compiled using standard languages and tools, replacing the custom-designed language and compiler used previously.
Arbitrum One was bridged to Nitro, on August 31st. Since then, the TVL on Arbitrum exploded to $2+ billion. One week after the Nitro announcement, Offchain Labs kickstarted Arbitrum Odyssey, an intiative that would help people learn about Arbitrum. During the event, people would answer questions about Arbitrum and get rewarded with exclusive NFTs designed by crypto-renowned artists Ratwell and Sugoi.
To make things more interesting, 56 of the most active projects on Arbitrum would participate, and fans would get to cheer for their favorite project. Of the 56 projects, 14 of them would receive an exclusive NFT. As for the users, they had to complete tasks at the end of which they would collect NFTs to complete the journey. Arbitrum Odyssey was oversubscribed within minutes, to the point where the team had to pause it.
Among other minor improvements, Offchain Labs announced AnyTrust Chains, an Arbitrum mode for ultra low-cost transactions. AnyTrust Chain will operate alongside Arbitrum One, with the difference that AnyTrust Chains would operate with less trust requirements. In addition, the L2 data wouldn’t be published on the L1, because the node can rely on the committee to provide the data. This setup would be fitted for enterprise use, and people could always use the trustless version of Arbitrum One.
The newest product to join the scaling lineup is Arbitrum Nova, a chain optimized for gaming and social applications. Although the testnet has a whitelist, as we’ve seen with previous releases, its launch will receive even more hype, as it's backed by industry giants such as: Reddit, FTX, Google Cloud and ConsenSys.
Arbitrum in 2023
In 2023, Arbitrum continued with its plans to decentralize its service. These efforts culminated with the release of the Arbitrum Foundation & DAO governance for Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova networks.
Arbitrum prioritizes secure scaling for Ethereum, aiming to decentralize the chain by eliminating central control points. Fraud proofs underpin its security and decentralization. While completely removing central control is unfeasible for upgrades, the Arbitrum DAO, empowered by $ARB token, governs upgradeability. The launch marks a significant step in Arbitrum's decentralization journey, following technological upgrades and increased validation. This move positions Arbitrum as a pioneer in Ethereum L2 scaling, aligning with Buterin's proposed maturity stages for rollups.
On March 23, Arbitrum airdropped 12.5% of its token supply to the users who have engaged with the Arbitrum network. The ARB token started trading above $1 immediately. Six months later, Arbitrum Foundation took $56 million worth of ARB tokens that haven't been claimed.
Towards the end of the year, Offchain Labs launched Stylus, a fresh programming environment tailored for chains operating on the Arbitrum Nitro stack. Within Stylus, users gain the ability to deploy contracts written in a range of new programming languages, such as Rust, C, C++, and potentially more, coexisting seamlessly with EVM contracts on the same chain.
EVM contracts within Stylus maintain identical behavior to those on Ethereum. We uphold Arbitrum's complete EVM equivalence while introducing a second, equally significant virtual machine dedicated to handling these new languages. These two VMs work in synchronous harmony, jointly defining the system's state transition function. We term this approach EVM+, emphasizing its entirely additive nature. Additionally, programs written in Stylus exhibit speeds over ten times faster than their EVM/Solidity counterparts, resulting in a significant reduction in fees.
Arbitrum is in a constant growth cycle, and network participants like us can earn more $ARB without too much hassle or technical knowledge, right from the comfort of our homes.
Learn how to do that in our Arbitrum Mining & Staking guide, which includes the exact steps and best methods of earning more crypto like $ARB in 2024 and beyond.