The much-anticipated Arbitrum is finally here.
At around 6:00 am on September 1, Beijing time, Arbitrum officially announced the launch of the mainnet test version Arbitrum One. For the sake of security, the current Arbitrum One still has certain conditions and restrictions. The development team Offchain Labs temporarily retains the control over network upgrades. The selection of cross-chain bridge assets and the selection of verifiers still need a white list. A speed limit of 80000 arbgas per second is set.
Cross-chain bridgeCross-chain bridgeor other third-party bridges (such ascBridge) After depositing funds, you can freely experience Arbitrum One. The way to set up the Arbitrum One network in Metamask is as follows:
Network Name: Arb1
Chain ID: 42161
Currency Symbol: ETH
Block Explorer URL: https://arbiscan.io
According to the official announcement, since the access to Arbitrum One was opened to developers in May, whitelists have been issued to more than 400 teams, and dozens of projects have witnessed the successful completion of application deployment.Arbitrum One PortalThe latest deployment progress of these projects can be tracked on . However, Arbitrum officials also emphasized that although many projects have completed deployment, not all projects will choose to start immediately. It is expected that only a few projects will be launched together with the mainnet public beta version today.
Although the official did not clearly mention which projects will be launched at the same time, after Odaily testing, at least the Arbitrum versions of Uniswap and Balancer have been launched, and users can experience transactions freely, but currently only ETH-WETH is available on Uniswap Trading pairs, while Balancer has launched 16 currencies such as BAL, LINK, COMP, YFI, CRV, etc., which will be more ideal in terms of tradable varieties for the time being.
From yesterday night to early morning of this morning, along with the Arbitrum One launch announcement, there were several other heavy news. Two key pieces of information are as follows:
First, Offchain Labs, the developer of Arbitrum, announced that it has completed a $120 million Series B round of financing at a valuation of $1.2 billion. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, and Polychain Capital, Ribbit Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Pantera Capital, Alameda Research, and Mark Cuban participated. cast.
The second is that Steven Goldfelder, co-founder of Offchain Labs, revealed that Arbitrum will not issue tokens in the short term, and the recent vision does not include token plans. The $120 million B round of financing is only equity financing.
Objectively speaking, it is not surprising that Arbitrum can obtain such a huge amount of financing. As the project with the fastest landing speed among several mainstream Rollup solutions, Arbitrum's previous financing status (seed round financing of 3.7 million US dollars in April 2019) It seems a bit unmatched with its status in the arena. In March of this year, Starkware, another big star Rollup expansion team, had already received US$75 million in financing. After half a year, the market sentiment has further increased. It is not too much for Arbitrum to get a valuation of US$1.2 billion at this time.
However, the failure to issue tokens somewhat disappointed the expectations of the community. In the blockchain world, Token is the best tool for building consensus. Arbitrum’s choice may have a certain impact on its development in the future.
As the first project to go live on the mainnet among mainstream EVM-compatible Rollups, the launch of Arbitrum One can be said to officially kick off the rollup time. However, considering the current market environment, the popularization of the Rollup solution may not be so smooth.
The new generation of public chains is undergoing a major explosion, from Solana, which has continued to be strong, to Avalanche and Fantom, which have cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and BSC and Polygon, which have exploded earlier (the Rollup scheme has not yet been implemented, and the sidechain scheme is closer to the external public chain. model), these external ecosystems play the role of Layer 2 of Ethereum to a certain extent, and have achieved certain regular results.
From a comprehensive comparison point of view, Arbitrum, which is temporarily the only representative of the Rollup track, has obvious advantages and disadvantages compared with external public chains such as Solana and Avalanche.
As an expansion solution approved by V God himself, Rollup is more in line with the upper-level consciousness of the Ethereum community, which can be seen from the ecosystem that came with Arbitrum when it was launched.Uniswap, Aave, Sushiswap, Maker... These leading projects that have worked hard and may not be able to invite the external ecology have completed their deployment on Arbitrum early in the morning. In addition, as an expansion solution attached to Ethereum for transaction verification, Arbitrum can directly enjoy the degree of decentralization and security of the Ethereum main network, which is also its advantage over other public chains that perform network verification themselves.
However, the outbreak stories of multiple public chains (side chains) have already told the market a truth - "to engage in ecology, one must be willing to spend money." In the middle of this month, Avalanche launched a USD 180 million ecological incentive fund; a few days ago, Fantom also decided to take out 370 million tokens as ecological incentives.Compared with these external public chains that use real money to attract users, Arbitrum, which does not issue tokens for the time being, lacks a key incentive work. Of course, it cannot be ruled out that the project itself will use its own tokens as incentives in order to seize the market in advance, but On the whole, Arbitrum still loses some initiative in liquidity incentives.
postpostHe pointed out that he was worried that the Rollup solution might not be so popular with users. Haseeb believes that ordinary users do not care about the security of the underlying network most of the time, but only care about some more intuitive experiences, such as whether the operation on the chain is cheap and whether the income is high enough...
Considering the situation of Arbitrum, the transaction fee has not always been the advantage of Rollup. Although the overall transaction cost has dropped significantly compared with the Ethereum layer 1, the transaction fee of $0. n still has certain disadvantages compared with the external public chain ecology , coupled with the lack of motivation and initiative mentioned above, the advancement rhythm of Arbitrum and the entire Rollup era may not be as smooth as many people expected.
However, as the optimal solution obtained on the long road of Ethereum expansion (whether it is OP or ZK), we still firmly believe in the unlimited potential of Rollup in the future. From a long-term perspective, Arbitrum is more suitable to become the main position of Ethereum’s ecological activities in the future, and the project itself will eventually complete value discovery in this tide of ecological transfer, but in the short term, I am personally cautious about its ecological growth manner.
