The announcement came late on Thursday, although dedicated observers uncovered it before official word broke. Check the timestamp…
DDOS alpha is the sweetest alpha
The announcement dropped after a weekend discussing which chain would be best for Curve to next dominate.
This in fact concludes a wild journey, eight months is a lifetime in DeFi.
In the early days, it was unclear if Curve would even be fairly allowed to launch on Arbitrum. The protocol is heavily backed by VCs, and VCs don’t particularly like Curve because they Curve grants them no preferential treatment. So early on Arbitrum appeared to snub the people’s protocol.
Maybe it’s unsurprising to see Curve arrive a few days after Arbitrum kicked off. Now it’s anybody’s guess whether Curve will eventually be able to outcompete the runaway favorite… <puts on reading glasses> ArbiNYAN.
If you’re not familiar with Arbitrum, it’s the endgame of the heated L2 Optimism vs ZK Rollup debate of ancient history. Back in the day, these were touted as the solution to Ethereum gas woes. Now it’s finally launching! And mainnet gas is back below 100!
Arbitrum represents an Optimism style L2 that interacts seamlessly with Ethereum. Their particular magic is in their dispute resolution mechanism. The operation of Arbitrum relies on their AnyTrust mechanism, which pushes dispute resolution to off-chain validators. With validators optimistically assumed to be operating in good faith, the chain can execute faster. Thanks to the AnyTrust solution, as long as one validator is acting honestly, it can even guarantee correct execution even if every other validator is malicious. The downside to this architecture is that final settlement can take longer, meaning up to a week to bridge your funds back to the main chain.
As a result of this firewall and reliance on off-chain validators, transactions within the Arbitrum walled garden can operate very fast and cheaply.
^^ Well… perhaps this is fast for you. For some of us, this means we’ll be rocking all night long 😎
Naturally, every competitive blockchain to Ethereum can advertise itself as quicker or cheaper when nobody’s using it. If users start to swarm these advantages can disappear.
Yet the unique architecture of Arbitrum may prove more resilient to scaling challenges than other chains.
As people rush to be the first to play with the new toy, we’re seeing activity on Arbitrum accelerating. More volume is hitting the bridge than previous flavor-of-the-week Solana. As we outlined yesterday though, this is all still quite a low volume compared with Ethereum mainnet.
The early reviews of Arbitrum are quite positive, which is great news for holders of its native token:
In case you’re not clear on the joke, read the official statement from Arbitrum ($ETH).
Happy DeFi Autumn!
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All proceeds from subscriptions go to support crypto activism at PAC DAO. Nothing in our newsletter can be construed as financial or legal advice. Author is a $CRV maximalist, and has not used Arbitrum but has a stake in its native $ETH.