- Arbitrum will launch on Friday after three years of development
- The layer 2 scaling solution promises vastly increased throughput and up to 270x cheaper gas fees
- Arbitrum is working with Alchemy to help developers migrate to the new protocol
Arbitrum, one of the many Ethereum layer 2 solutions to try and achieve scaling on the six-year-old platform, goes live tomorrow. Arbitrum promises to massively increase the transaction throughput while also reducing gas fees by as much as 270x, with extensive testing having been conducted since February 2020. Arbitrum will launch ahead of another layer 2 solution, Optimism, whose mainnet launch was recently delayed until the summer.
Roll Up, Roll Up for Arbitrum Scaling!
Arbitrum was announced in 2018 by creators Offchain Labs. Arbitrum works through ‘rollups’ to offer a combination of trustless security, scalability, and minimal transaction costs to help bring Ethereum’s performance up to the standards demanded by the ever-growing DeFi space and in the shadow of competing protocols.
Rollups are essentially a sidechain compilation of transactions that will settle to the mainchain at a future point in time, with the term “rollup” referring to the way the sidechain bundles a number of transactions together. Arbitrum is an example of an “optimistic rollup”, which means that state changes are initially published with minimal checks on fraud or other anomalies, allowing the transaction to be processed quicker. However, users can flag invalid updates as fraudulent, whereupon the updates are rolled back and the bad actors are punished by the protocol.
Alchemy Partnership Eases dApp Migration
Arbitrum also caters for developers looking to switch their dApp to the scaling solution thanks to a partnership with developer platform Alchemy. Alchemy, which its creators say powers 70% of the top Ethereum applications and has conducted over $30 billion in on-chain transactions, will help developers migrate their code from Ethereum to Arbitrum, ensuring swift and easy scaling.
Ethereum supporters have been crying out for a powerful, reliable and easy to migrate layer 2 scaling solution since bottlenecks first appeared on the network in 2017, and Arbitrum represents the first glimpse into this new technology.
