Written by: Karen

After the official announcement of Optimism’s coin issuance and generous airdrop, the early participation opportunity of Arbitrum, another Layer 2 expansion challenger, has also attracted much attention. And this month, Arbitrum also announced the launch of The Arbitrum Odyssey, a two-month ecological adoption plan with Project Galaxy, which will distribute exclusive NFTs to qualified users. This plan is expected to further promote and deepen the substantial adoption of the Arbitrum ecosystem.

In this article, Foresight News will summarize the projects worthy of attention in the Arbitrum ecosystem from the categories of cross-chain bridges, DeFi, NFT, games, and Arbitrum-supporting infrastructure and tools. Before summarizing the Arbitrum ecological projects, we will first have a general understanding of the Arbitrum team background, financing history and Arbitrum progress.

What is Arbitrum? how is the progress?

The team behind Arbitrum is Offchain Labs. Offchain Labs was co-founded by Ed Felten, a former White House technical official during Obama's tenure and a long-term professor at Princeton University. The other two co-founders are Steven Goldfeder and Harry Kalodner. The three officially founded Offchain Labs when they were at Princeton University .

Offchain Labs completed a US$3.7 million seed round of financing led by Pantera Capital in March 2019, and completed a US$20 million Series A financing in April last year.Completed $120 million financing at a valuation of $1.2 billion, Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, and other well-known investors include Polychain Capital, Ribbit Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Pantera Capital, Alameda Research, Mark Cuban, etc.

Steven Goldfelder, co-founder of Offchain Labs, said at the end of August last year, "Arbitrum will not issue tokens in the short term, and the recent vision does not include token plans. The team will avoid tokens for incentive plans. 120 million US dollars B The round was equity-only. The DAO may be tokenized in the future, though.”

When announcing the $120 million financing, Offchain Labs also opened the Arbitrum One mainnet to users. The Arbitrum One mainnet is built as an EVM-compatible Optimistic Rollup that advances the state of the chain by letting any validator publish a Rollup block that claims to be correct, and then giving everyone else a chance to challenge that claim.

If there is no objection during the challenge period (about one week), Arbitrum will confirm that the Rollup block is correct. If anyone doubts it, the dispute will be resolved through interactive proof, and the deposit of the cheating party will be confiscated, and the correct party will be A portion of the deposit is charged as an incentive.

In order to further increase throughput and reduce costs, Offchain Labs said in March this year that it will launch the Arbitrum Nitro developer network and migrate Arbitrum One to the Nitro stack in the future.

In addition, Offchain Labs will also launch AnyTrust, a new layer-2 network on Ethereum. AnyTrust, operated by the node committee, will provide the smallest trust assumptions. Only 2 honest nodes out of 20 nodes are required to run the network, and there is no need to use Layer 2 The transaction records are synchronized to the Ethereum main network, and the operating efficiency will be higher. At that time, Arbitrum Nitro and AnyTrust will jointly operate, and facilities such as cross-chain bridges between the two will be established.

Arbitrum network performance

Among all the current Layer 2 expansion solutions, according to L2BEAT data, Arbitrum currently leads with a dominant position of over US$3.6 billion,Occupies nearly 57% of the total locked volume of L2. From the perspective of breakdown data, according to the data from DefiLlama, Arbitrum's total lock-up volume is 2.55 billion US dollars (lower than the statistics of L2BEAT),Source: DefiLlama

Source: DefiLlama

Source: DefiLlama

Source: DefiLlama

Source: Dune Analytics

Source: Dune Analytics

Arbitrum Ecological Summary

According to incomplete statistics, the Arbitrum ecological portal has listed more than 170 projects. After re-optimizing the classification, we found that six months after the Arbitrum One mainnet was launched, Arbitrum has gradually taken shape. Currently, fromIn terms of participation entrances, there are about 60 projects that support deposits and withdrawals, wallets, exchanges, bridges and cross-chain projects; nearly 40 DeFi applications are mainly distributed in derivatives, AMM and revenue optimization; in addition, NFT, TreasureDAO plays a dominant role in the 3 NFT markets. The NFT series in Bridgeworld, a metaverse game under TreasureDAO, is relatively popular, and most other NFT projects lack lasting popularity; there are also more than 30 tools, infrastructure and node providers that support Arbitrum .

Among the 56 projects included in The Arbitrum Odyssey Ecological Adoption Plan, after community voting,Yield Protocol, Hashflow, Aboard Exchange, tofuNFT, Uniswap, ApeX, 1inch, Yin Finance, DODO, Swapr, TreasureDAO, BattleFly, Ideamarket and SushiSwap promoted, Arbitrum will jointly launch a two-month program with Project Galaxy to attract users to experience these projects, and users who collect at least 12 of the 15 NFTs will be eligible to receive the final arbi-verse NFT designed by encryption artists Ratwell and Sugoi.

Deposit/Withdrawal/Wallet/Exchange

In centralized encrypted exchanges,Bitget, Binance, Bybit, Crypto.com, FTX, Huobi, KuCoin, MEXC, OKXetc. have integrated the Arbitrum One main network, and support the deposit and withdrawal of ETH or USDT.

In terms of wallets, according to the summary of the Arbitrum ecological website, there areBitKeep、Coinbase Wallet、MetaMask、DeBank、imToken、MathWallet、Trust Wallet、Zapper、Zerion 24 have supported the Arbitrum One mainnet.

Others that support Arbitrum network deposits and withdrawals are:

Banxa：Supports the purchase of ETH and USDT on Arbitrum with fiat currency via Visa or Mastercard.

CryptoRefills：You can use cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin to buy gift cards, vouchers or recharge mobile operators, supporting Bitcoin, Bitcoin Lightning Network, Polygon, Avalanche, Fantom, Arbitrum and other networks.

Mt Pelerin：Crypto-fiat gateway, supports fiat currency to buy or sell cryptocurrencies, supported networks include Ethereum, Gnosis Chain, BNB Chain, Arbitrum and RSK.

Transak：Bridge/Cross-chain

Bridge/Cross-chain

Arbitrum One Bridge (Official Bridge):Users are allowed to cross-chain multiple tokens between L1 and L2. It takes about 10 minutes from L1 to L2, and it takes about 8 days from L2 to L1.

Across Protocol (hot project):Cross-chain transfers of Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, and Boba are currently supported, but cross-L2 transfers are not currently allowed.

Across Protocol has previously issued a proposal for the token ACX in mid-March. The proposal shows that the total amount of ACX is 100 million, of which 85 million will be allocated to the Across Dao treasury for incentives and future token sales. , 10 million will be allocated for airdrop.

BoringDAO：Support asset transfer or cross-chain among 14 networks including Ethereum, Arbitrum, BNB Chain, Polygon, Optimism, etc.

Bungee (formerly FundMovr):Supports asset transfers between Ethereum, Optimism, BNB Chain, Gnosis Chain, Fantom, Arbitrum, Avalanche, and Aurora.

Multichain (hot project):Support asset transfer between Ethereum, Aribiturm, Avalanche, BNB Chain, Fantom, Polygon, Moonbeam and other networks.

Celer cBridge (hot item):Currently, asset transfers between 27 networks including Ethereum, Aribiturm, Astar, BNB Chain, Avalanche, Polygon, Fantom, Flow, Metis, Oasis Emerald, Aurora, Harmony, Moonbeam, Moonriver, and Optimism are supported.

Composable Finance Mosaic：Mosaic is Composable Finance's cross-layer asset transfer system, which uses liquidity management and just-in-time (JIT) liquidity robots to leverage the existing bridging infrastructure network, serving as a bridge connecting multiple EVM compatible scaling solutions, allowing users to Seamlessly transfer tokens between Square, Polygon, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Moonriver and Fantom.

Connext：The interoperability protocol Connext now supports cross-chain transfers between 16 networks, including Ethereum, Aribiturm, BNB Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, Fantom, Gnosis Chain, Optimism, and more. Connext has announced the native token NEXT and the contributor plan, with a total of 1 billion tokens (not yet launched), and NEXT has completed the airdrop snapshot.

deBridge (Hot Items):Support Ethereum, BNB Chain, Polygon, Arbitrum, Avalancheassets cross-chain.

Hop (Hot Item):Support asset cross-chain among Ethereum, Polygon, Gnosis Chain, Optimism, and Arbitrum.

LI.FI (Hot Items):Support asset transfer and exchange between 14 networks including Ethereum, Polygon, BNB Chain, Gnosis Chain, Optimism, and Arbitrum.

pNetwork：Supports cross-chain asset transfers between more than 10 networks such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin through pTokens.

RenBridge：Supports transferring assets between Ethereum, Polygon, Fantom, Avalanche, Solana, BNB Chain, and Arbitrum.

Router Protocol：It is a cross-chain infrastructure that supports cross-chain transfers and exchanges. The supported networks include Polygon, BNB Chain, Avalanche, Fantom, Arbitrum, and Optimism.

Rubic：Multi-chain exchange protocol, supporting Ethereum, BNB Chain, Polygon, Harmony, Avalanche, Moonriver, Fantom, Solana, Arbitrum, Aurora, NEAR and Telos networks.

SOCKET：Supports asset exchange between Arbitrum, Avalanche, BNB Chain, Ethereum, Fantom, Optimism, Polygon, Gnosis Chain, and Aurora, and integrates bridge solutions such as Hop, Polygon Bridge, Hyphen, Arbitrum Bridge, and Celer.

Stargate (Popular Project):The cross-chain bridge based on the cross-chain interoperability protocol LayerZero supports asset cross-chain exchange of Ethereum, BNB Chain, Avalanche, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism and Fantom.

Synapse Protocol (popular project):Support cross-chain asset transfer and exchange between 16 networks.

O3 Swap：It started to support Arbitrum in October last year, and also supports Ethereum, BNB Chain and Polygon.

DeFi

Derivatives

Derivatives

removeDeri Protocol、Futureswap、Hegic、MCDEX、Pods Finance、VolmexBesides, there are:

ApeX：Derivatives Agreement, completed a seed round of financing in March, with an undisclosed amount, led by Dragonfly Capital, with participation from Jump Trading, Tiger Global, Mirana Ventures, CyberX, Kronos, and M77 Ventures. Afterwards, ApeX also launched the ApeX NFT series, landed on Bybit Launchpad 2.0, and launched the first round of airdrops.

In the published ApeX pledge information, users who pledge on the ApeX protocol can obtain esAPEX and veAPEX, in which users can reinvest the pledge reward esAPEX, convert it into APEX after a six-month vesting period, and continue to pledge esAPEX to Earn extra esAPEX. veAPEX is a proof of pledge, which has voting rights for ApeX's governance contract, and can also earn fee rewards by holding veAPEX.

Aboard Exchange：The order book derivatives protocol has been launched on Arbitrum and will be expanded to multi-chains in the future. According to public documents, Aboard's trading system engineer team includes technology executives with more than 20 years of industry experience from software and IT services company SunGard and chief architects of major commodity exchanges.

Dopex (hot item):Decentralized options protocol, currently supports Arbitrum, BNB Chain, Avalanche and Metis. Dopex provides liquidity for option traders through the option pool, and enhances the interests of both buyers and sellers of option contracts through the rebate system and arbitrage function.

Dopex’s single-currency staking option vault allows users to lock their tokens for a period of time to earn yield on their staked assets. Users can deposit assets into a contract, which then sells your deposited asset as a call option to the buyer at a fixed strike price (at the end of the mutually chosen expiration month).

GMX (Hot Items):Decentralized spot and derivatives protocol, renamed from Gambit on the original BNB Chain, currently supports Arbitrum and Avalanche, allows up to 30 times leverage, and rewards all transaction fees in the form of ETH or AVAX to token pledgers.

GMX trading is powered by a multi-asset pool that earns liquidity provider fees through market making, exchange fees, and leveraged trading. GMX has launched the utility and governance token GMX, GMX stakers can get 30% of platform fees and Escrowed GMX and Multiplier Points. In addition, GLP, the liquidity provider token of GMX, is composed of asset indices used for exchange and leveraged transactions. In addition to determining the price of GLP, the price of GLP also needs to consider the profit and loss of GLP during the game with traders. GLP token stakers receive 70% of platform fees and Escrowed GMX rewards.

According to the official website, the total transaction volume of GMX on Avalanche exceeds $8 billion, and on Arbitrum nearly $27 billion, with a total of over 13,000 users.

Jones DAO：For options income, strategy, and liquidity agreements, the Primary Jones Vaults product allows users to deposit basic assets and obtain yield asset tokens jAssets to represent their deposits. After a certain time window, jAssets can be destroyed To extract the original underlying assets and obtain income. On the other hand, Vaults will seek to avoid risks as much as possible and obtain stable income. Most of the funds will be used to earn income by holding covered call options, and up to 5% of the funds will be used for Hedging by buying calls, puts or perpetuals. Jones Vaults may lock in small risk-free gains through cross-platform options arbitrage.

In addition, Jones DAO will also launch Auxiliary Jones Vaults to deploy more aggressive option strategies.

Jones DAO has released the token JONES, which has the functions of governance, liquidity incentives, and staking to generate veJONES. It is worth mentioning that jAsset has composable lines, which can be used as collateral to borrow assets on other platforms, and can also be pledged with other supported assets in the Jones DAO pledge section to earn more JONES.

Tracer DAO (Hot Project):It is a meta-protocol for derivatives. The current core application is Perpetual Pools, where users can purchase leveraged tokens (ERC-20) in the form of leveraged tokens that will not expire or be liquidated, and can also be pledged to earn rewards , and can also be combined to further improve capital efficiency. Tracer V1 built on Balancer's underlying infrastructure will charge 1% of the locked amount as an agreement fee, and the V2 version, which can be deployed without permission and can be held for a long time, will be released soon.

Tracer DAO has released the governance token TCR, allocating 10% of the tokens to a 5-year liquidity mining reward program.

In June last year, Tracer DAO previously completed two rounds of financing totaling US$9 million, with investors including Framework Ventures, DACM, Maven 11, and Apollo Capital.

Exchange/AMM

Currently, the exchange and AMM protocols extended from other ecological extensions on Arbitrum areSushiSwap, Curve, Uniswap, Balancer and 1inch, DODO and Saddle Financeetc. In addition, some of the aforementioned cross-chain protocols provide exchange services.

Swapr：It is a multi-chain AMM based on Uniswap fork, currently supports Ethereum, Arbitrum, Gnosis Chain.

ZipSwap：It is a native DEX that adopts the Optimistic Rollup scheme on the second-layer network, and currently supports Optimism and Arbitrum. ZipSwap has released the token ZIP and has a veZIP model.

Lending / Algorithmic Stablecoins

The lending projects on Arbitrum that have expanded from Ethereum and other ecosystems include:Aave、dForce、Hundred Finance, the algorithmic stablecoin project has Abracadabra。

Aave V3 (Hot):In March, Aave launched Aave V3 on Polygon, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Fantom, Harmony, and Optimism. The Aave v3 upgrade introduces new features such as cross-chain asset liquidity, community contribution tools, Gas optimization models, and high-efficiency modes. In addition, it will also integrate a A series of decentralized applications.

Vesta Finance (Hot Project):It is a lending agreement on Arbitrum. Official documents show that advisors include SushiSwap co-founder 0xMaki, DCFGod and Lau Brothers (via Not3Lau Capital).

Users can deposit collateral to mint Vesta's stablecoin, VST (pegged to the U.S. dollar), which can be redeemed at any time. The minimum mortgage rate in Vesta is low, such as 110% for ETH, 110% for renBTC, and 175% for gOHM.

VSTA is the governance token of Vesta Finance. Users can participate in Vesta Finance's liquidity incentive plan to earn VSTA.

Sperax：It is a mortgage algorithm stablecoin project on Arbitrum. It was established in 2020 and completed a $6 million private token sale led by Amber Group, Alameda Research and DJ Steve Aoki at the end of December last year.

Sperax's USDs has been listed on Arbitrum, and the current total lock-up volume is more than 26 million US dollars. Users can mint USDs with Sperax tokens USDT or USDC and SPA tokens. Sperax will also provide USDs holders with passive income. The income is generated by the collateral in the DeFi income aggregator, and then USDs are purchased from the open market and destroyed, and finally distributed to USDs holders in the form of rebase. In the future, if governance votes in favor of distributing protocol fees to SPA stakers, more fees will be distributed to SPA token holders.

Liquidity service/revenue optimization/fixed interest rate

Among these categories, except Yearn Finance、Beefy Finance、xToken、Pickle Finance In addition, there are the following projects:

iZUMi Finance (Hot Items):Programmable Liquidity-as-a-Service based on Uniswap V3 LP NFT, currently supports Ethereum, Arbitrum and Polygon. iZUMi Finance has completed a total of US$5.6 million in financing. Investors include Bybit, Mirana Ventures, IOSG Ventures, Everest Ventures Group, Cadenza, Fenbushi Capital, EVG, Hashkey, GSR, etc.

The LiquidBox platform launched by iZUMi Finance enables users to participate in liquidity mining activities by staking Uniswap V3 LP NFT to obtain token rewards. Liquidity mining is mainly divided into three types, namely the centralized fixed reward price range model (Fixed Range), the dynamic range model (Dynamic Range) and the unilateral liquidity model (One Side). For details, please refer to the following report.

Recommended reading: "

Recommended reading: "iZUMi Research 4D Report: Current Status and Future Prospects of DeFi Liquidity》

Strips Finance：Recommended reading: "

Recommended reading: "Understand the fixed income platform Strips Finance mechanism and application scenarios》

Vovo Finance：It is a structured product agreement on Arbitrum. It has completed a US$2 million seed round of financing in mid-April, led by IOSG Ventures, Matrixport, Ledger Prime, Zee Prime Capital, Pattern Research, Primitive Ventures, imToken, Kyber Network, Daedalus and CyberX and others participated in the investment.

Among the current main products of Vovo Finance, Vault will first obtain rewards through the Curve pool, then convert the rewards into USDC, and then open leveraged positions on GMX. The vault charges a management fee of 2% and a performance fee of 10% every year. The Vault smart contract has been audited by PeckShield and Hashloak, but is still in Alpha mode.

Yield Protocol：Incubated by Paradigm, it is a fixed-rate lending protocol on Ethereum and Arbitrum. At present, the only collateral type available on Arbitrum is Arbitrum Ether (AETH), and other collaterals will be added to the yield agreement in the future.

In June last year, Yield Protocol completed a financing of US$10 million, led by Paradigm, and participated by Framework Ventures, Symbolic Capital Partners, CMS Holdings, Variant, and DeFi Alliance.

YIN Finance：other

other

Umbra：It is a privacy payment project that launched Optimism and Arbitrum in early April this year, and has previously supported Ethereum and Polygon. Umbra achieves partial privacy of transfers through stealth addresses.

Ideamarket：It is an Arbitrum-based decentralized information reputation market for content creators, aiming to mine high-quality content. Specifically, users can copy their own URL links (including tweet links, etc.) to launch content on the market, and then others can use Ideamarket tokens IMO to buy part of this content. If more people like the content, Both creators and supporters can benefit.

Superfluid：It is a capital flow protocol designed to achieve programmable cash flow, which is relatively flexible. Use cases include processing subscription fees, wages, rewards, periodic transfers, and any combinable value flow. Improve capital efficiency through continuous settlement and netting per second .

Superfluid is currently live on the Polygon, Gnosis Chain, Arbitrum, and Optimism networks. In July last year, Superfluid completed a $9 million seed round led by Multicoin Capital.

Solv Protocol：NFT market

NFT 

NFT market

Stratos (Hot Items):In March, the NFT market Quixotic team on Optimism launched Stratos, a general-purpose NFT market on Arbitrum, allowing users to sell and buy NFT, as well as view market overview data. Also, there is a Launchpad, which is currently available for application.

tofuNFT：is a multi-chain NFT marketplace focused on GameFi and collectibles, supporting 27 blockchain networks.

TreasureDAO (hot project):NFT/Game

NFT/Game

The NFT projects on Arbitrum are much higher than other Layer 2 projects such as Optimism, but only a few projects are more popular. A total of 16 series are listed on the homepage of TreasureDAO, the largest NFT market in Arbitrum, and 3 of the first 6 series are NFT series in TreasureDAO Metaverse Bridgeworld.

Legion Genesis：The NFT series in TreasureDAO Metaverse Bridgeworld will also have other functions such as pledge. The current floor price has reached 4350 MAGIC, and the total transaction volume is 7.2 million MAGIC.

Smol Brains：Monkey dynamic PFP project, the bigger the brain, the higher the IQ, the total transaction volume is 20.9 million MAGIC, and the floor price is 1447 MAGIC.

Seed of Life：The total trading volume is 10.4 million MAGIC

Toadstoolz：The toad life simulation game on the chain, with a total turnover of over 400,000 MAGIC.

Legion Auxiliary：Descendants of the Genesis Legions in Bridgeworld, TreasureDAO's metaverse.

Treasures：Composable building blocks in Bridgeworld that will be used across and within the metaverse.

In another NFT market, Stratos, there are more than 40 NFT projects listed on the homepage, but only the first 3 projects have a transaction volume of more than 4 ETH.

Tool/Infrastructure Support

Combined with the Arbitrum ecological portal summary, the supported tools and infrastructure include Band Protocol, Biconomy, BlockVision, Chainlink, Covalent, DefiLlama, Etherscan, Nansen, Snapshot, Tenderly, The Graph, Truffle Suite, etc. More than 20.

node provider

Arbitrum's current node providers are Alchemy, Ankr, DataHub, GetBlock, Infura, Moralis, and QuickNode.