#ARB🔥🔥🔥 will unlock 92,650,000 ARB tokens on January 16th, constituting approximately 2.20% of the currently circulating supply.
Arbitrum is a second-layer blockchain built on top of Ethereum. Arbitrum's Optimistic Rollup technology allows developers to easily launch smart contracts and decentralized applications on Ethereum without any changes, with lower transaction fees and increased throughput.
In the first half of 2022, Arbitrum became the leading L2 solution for Ethereum in terms of the number of transactions, the number of applications, and the volume of locked liquidity (TVL - Total Value Locked). Currently, more than $6 billion is locked in its smart contracts. The Arbitrum project was developed by Offchain Labs, an American company founded in 2018 in New York by Ed Felten, Stephen Goldfeder, and Harry Kalodner. All three are experts in cryptography and blockchain technologies.
Ed Felten worked as a professor of computer science at Princeton University. Ed Felten began his research in the field of blockchain technologies back in 2014. He worked in the White House as Deputy CTO of President Barack Obama, and then returned to Princeton University and, together with his then graduate students Stephen Goldfeder and Harry Kalodner, began working on Arbitrum. In 2019, Offchain Labs raised $3.7 million in seed investment. In the spring of 2021, before the launch of the alpha version of the Arbitrum network, the startup held a Series A investment round, as a result of which it received $20 million.
The official launch of the Arbitrum One mainnet took place on August 31, 2021. At the same time, Offchain Labs announced that it had raised $120 million in a Series B round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Other notable investors include Polychain Capital, Ribbit Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Pantera Capital, Mark Cuban, and Alameda Research (we're putting a little red mark here because we remember the FTX and Alameda crash, but Alameda's investment is a small part of the overall investment, so it's a mark, but still a very small one). After this round, the company was valued at $1.2 billion.
Arbitrum is an Optimistic Rollup built on top of Ethereum. To understand what is under the hood of the project and what the Arbitrum network is from a technical point of view, let's start with a small theoretical block.
What are rollups?
Rollup is the core technology for second-level protocols for Ethereum. It allows for high transaction privacy and scaling of the main Ethereum network: multiple transactions are combined into a single package, which is confirmed in the first-level blockchain.
In simple terms, in order to reduce the load on the network, the developers decided that any transaction will be considered authentic until proven otherwise. Calculations occur only when fraud is proven in the event of problems.
