What is Arbitrum?

Arbitrum is a layer 2 solution designed to enhance the capabilities of Ethereum smart contracts, increasing their speed and scalability while adding security features. The platform is designed to allow developers to easily run unmodified Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) contracts and Ethereum transactions on the second layer, while benefiting from Ethereum's excellent layer 1 security. It is designed to address some of the shortcomings of current Ethereum-based smart contracts, such as low efficiency and high execution costs, which have damaged the Ethereum user experience and often made transactions a costly task. Arbitrum uses a technique known as optimistic aggregation. Transactions are executed off-chain, before being grouped into large batches and sent to the Ethereum mainnet as call data. This process offloads much of the computational and storage load that Ethereum currently faces, moving them off-chain. Each batch incurs a fixed transaction fee on Ethereum, distributed per transaction on Arbitrum, reducing costs for end users. Off-chain transactions are considered valid, hence the name &&optimistic& ... The initiative is led by Offchain Labs co-founders Ed Felten, Steven Goldfeder, and Harry Kalodner. Ed is a professor, Steven holds a PhD, and Harry is a PhD candidate at Princeton University. All three are blockchain experts passionate about improving the capabilities of cryptocurrencies.

How does arbitration work?

Arbitrum is a type of technology called optimistic pooling. It allows Ethereum smart contracts to scale by passing messages between smart contracts on the Ethereum main chain and contracts on the Arbitrum second-layer chain. The majority of transaction processing is done on the second layer and the results of this are recorded on the main chain, greatly improving speed and efficiency. It is optimistic in the sense that any validator has the ability to publish a cumulative block and confirm the validity of other blocks, while the term cumulative is used to describe the use of public information to reconstruct the complete history of the chain from an optimized chain. Event log. The Arbitrum protocol ensures that code will execute correctly (i.e. as expected) as long as all validators are honest, making the network resistant to collusion and other forms of attack. Like many blockchains, individual nodes can choose to participate in the Arbitrum chain. Validator nodes that participate in observing the state of the chain and full nodes that aggregate layer 1 transactions that submit transactions to the layer 1 chain earn rewards paid in ETH, while the remaining portion of a user's transaction fees is distributed to other participants in the network, such as validators. Arbitrum introduces a challenge period for accumulated blocks, where other validators will verify the correctness of a block and issue a challenge if they believe it is incorrect. If the block is found to be incorrect or a challenge is proven to be invalid, the lying validator will have their stake confiscated, ensuring that validators always play fair or risk consequences. The platform also has its own custom virtual machine, aptly named the Arbitrum Virtual Machine (AVM). This is the execution environment for Arbitrum smart contracts and it lives on top of EthBridge, a collection of smart contracts that interface with the Arbitrum chain. Ethereum-compatible smart contracts are automatically translated to run on AVMs.

What makes Arbitrum unique?

The project is designed to provide an easy-to-use platform that developers can use to launch highly efficient and scalable Ethereum-compatible smart contracts. But it is not the first platform to try to overcome Ethereum's limitations, there are at least dozens of other solutions that are looking to provide similar functionality. So what makes Arbitrum different from the rest? Well, it has a few unique features, including:

High EVM compatibility

Arbitrum is considered one of the most EVM compatible compilations. It is compatible with EVM at the bytecode level and any language that can compile to EVM will work fine, such as Solidity and Vyper. This makes development easier as developers do not need to learn a new language before building on Arbitrum.

Powerful development tools

The team behind Arbitrum does everything they can to minimize the barriers to entry when developing their Layer 2 solution. As such, they have created extensive documentation for Arbitrum developers and developers can start using existing tools for Ethereum. There is no need to download anything specific to Arbitrum, such as plugins or compilers like Hardhat or Truffle.

Low Fees

As a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum, Arbitrum is designed to not only increase Ethereum's transaction throughput, but also reduce transaction fees at the same time.

Thanks to its extremely efficient stacking technology, Arbitrum can reduce fees to a fraction of those on Ethereum, while still providing sufficient incentives for validators.

Launching quite

well Arbitrum has been running several testnets since October and is now on mainnet for developers. Unlike many other Layer 2 scaling solutions, Arbitrum does not have its own utility token — hence, there is no token sale. In addition, any interested developers will have time to prepare and operate before Arbitrum opens to the public, with Arbitrum recently pledging to give the 250+ registered development teams building on its mainnet at least two weeks of development time before opening Arbitrum One to the public.

A well-developed development ecosystem

Arbitrum has worked with many Ethereum infrastructure projects and DApps, including Uniswap, DODO, Sushi, and dozens more..