What is arbitrum?

L2-solution Arbitrum was developed by the American company Offchain Labs, created in 2018 in New York Eda Felten, Stephen Goldfeder and Harry Calodner. All three are specialists in the field of cryptography and blockchain technologies, Felten worked as a professor of computer sciences at Princeton University.

In 2019, Offchain Labs attracted sowing investments in the amount of $ 3.7 million. In the spring of 2021, before launching the alpha version of the ARBITRUM network, the startup held an investment round of the https://gagarin.news/news/the-6-most-expensive-cryptocurrencies-in-the-world/ A series, as a result of which he received $ 20 million.

The official launch of the main network Arbitrum One took place on August 31, 2021. Then Offchain Labs announced the attraction of $ 120 million as part of the round of the B series, which was headed by the Lightspeed Venture Partners Foundation. Among other significant investors are Polychain Capital, Ribbit Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Pantera Capital, Alameda Research and Mark Kyuban. After that, the company received an estimate of $ 1.2 billion.

What are the features of arbitrum and what is Optimistic Rollups?

The low speed of transactions and high commissions in Ethereum led to the appearance of several projects at once, which took up the development of solutions on top of the main network in order to increase its performance.

The ARBITRUM network uses Optimistic Rollups technology for these purposes. Transaction processing occurs in the second -level network, while the main network Ethereum is responsible for the security layer. In the process of processing in the L2 network, many transactions are combined into a compact unit, which is included in the validators in the main Ethereum network.

The term “Optimistic” is a reference to the principle, which suggests that any transaction “optimistic” is considered genuine until the opposite has been proved. This concept was developed for a competing L2 network called Optimism. However, Arbitrum developers have improved technology by introducing multi -stage protection against fraud, which consumes much less gas than one -stage protection in Optimism.

To pay for transaction commissions on the ARBITRUM network, ETH is used, as well as in Ethereum. Translated on the ARBITRUM network on average by 90-95% cheaper Ethereum, and there remains great potential for further decrease in commissions.

Unlike other L2 networks, Arbitrum does not have a native token. Representatives of Offchain Labs did not voice specific plans for its release. In August 2021, Ed Felten said in an interview that in the future the network can be transferred to Tao, which involves the release of the control token. This statement supports the hope of crypto community for the distribution of tokens among early users, similarly to how in early June 2022 this happened on the Optimism network.

How Arbitrum works?

Arbitrum is deployed on the first (l1) and second (l2) levels. The EthBridge component, which is a set of smart contracts, works on the Ethereum network and contains folders of incoming and outgoing transactions.

For transactions from L1 to L2 and back, its own virtual machine (Arbitrum Virtual Machine, AVM) is responsible, which is completely compatible with the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM). AVM supports all EVM programming languages, such as Vyper, Solidity, Flint, Yul+, Lall, which greatly simplifies the development of applications.

On the network of L2, the performance of smart contracts and processing transactions is engaged in the ARBOS operating system. She transfers transactions via AVM to the outgoing transactions of the Rollup protocol for their further adding to the block, confirmation and inclusion in the main chain of Ethereum.

The approval of new blocks is engaged in validators who receive transaction commissions for this. Arbitrum architecture is arranged so that one honest validator can approve the block, regardless of how many malicious validators exist.

Among the nodes-nodes, the roles are distributed as follows:

• Active validator-relies in a bet (puts his ETH in a deposit smart contract) and offers new blocks to add Ethereum to the main chain. If the proposed block is wrong, the validator will lose the rate;
• Protective validator – observes the operation of the protocol of the package and intervenes in the event of irregular blocks, offering its block or making a bet on the block of another validator;
• Watchtower – only monitors the operation of the Rollup protocol without betting.

Due to the fact that protective and patrol validators have 8 days to challenge the block, the same period takes the withdrawal of assets on the Native bridge from Arbitrum to Ethereum.

What is included in the ARBITRUM ecosystem?

As of the beginning of July 2022, more than 200 blockchain projects have already been operating on the basis of Arbitrum. Among them:

• The largest Defi protocols are Uniswap, Sushiswap, Curve and 1inch;
• Reserve and algorithmic stablecoins USDT, USDC, DAI, FRAX, TUSD, etc.D.;
• original services, such as a platform for the trading of unlimited GMX contracts and a DFORCE landing service;
• Yearn Finance, Pickle Finance, Badger, Beefy Finance unit;
• NFT markets Lootex, Stratos, Tofunft, etc.

The ARBITRUM network is supported by many Web3-wallets-Metamask, Trust Wallet, Mathwallet and others. For the first half of 2022, the largest centralized crypto -rhins, including Binance, OKX, Gate, announced the possibility of supporting the ETH and a number of stabiblcoins.Io, kucoin, ftx and t.P. In addition, more than 20 cross-bridges operate with Arbitrum, including Multichain, Hop Exchange, Stargate, Across and others.

How Arbitrum develops?

Arbitrum One is not only the most popular L2 solution for the scaling of Ethereum, but also included in the top 10 decentralized networks on TVL and the number of Defi applications.

In June 2022, to popularize the ARBITRUM ONE L2 network and attracting users launched an 8-week program Arbitrum Odyssey. It includes eight stages, each of which is dedicated to a certain aspect of the ARBITRUM ecosystem.

More than 140 thousand users took part in the first and second stages, causing a network overload and growth of transaction commissions. Users who have completed the tasks of each stage are awarded with special NFT from the Project Galaxy service. According to the terms of the competition, upon receipt of 12 tokens, the participant also receives another NFT, the purpose of which is not yet known. Only those who fulfilled all the conditions of the first stage can participate in Arbitrum Odyssey.

In the near future, they plan to release an update Arbitrum Nitro, which will further reduce transaction commissions and increase network throughput. The essence of the update is that for large projects on the network, for example, for blockchain-IGR, Anytrust chains will be unfolded, which will work under the control of the “Committee” of 20 validators and should become a faster and cheap analogue of the Sidchans.