According to Cointelegraph, Offchain Labs, the original developer of the Arbitrum blockchain and Stylus, announced the launch of the Arbitrum Stylus mainnet. Stylus is a backwards-compatible virtual machine designed to remove common obstacles to Web3 decentralized application development.
Stylus allows developers to build applications on Arbitrum using WebAssembly (WASM) compatible languages, which is expected to drive the launch of powerful Web3 applications and use cases with low gas fees.
Ed Felten, co-founder and chief scientist of Offchain Labs, said at the Korea Blockchain Week conference that Stylus unifies the two main ways of writing smart contracts on blockchains: the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and traditional programming languages like Rust, C, and C++.
Felten explained that developers can now choose to develop contracts in any style, and they will be fully interoperable and fully composable on the same chain. Stylus' multi-language support encourages developers to build applications on Arbitrum using the tools that work best for them.
Offchain Labs CEO Steven Goldfeder added that developers can use Stylus to expand current market products. Some Stylus programs can run 70 times faster than EVM programs, allowing more transactions within the gas limit, thereby reducing overall costs.
Offchain Labs plans to integrate other popular protocols such as ZK-proofs into Arbitrum. Felten believes that future Web3 protocols will be hybrid protocols that contain optimistic elements and ZK elements, which will be more economically viable than pure optimistic or pure ZK.
