Original author: hitesh.eth
Original translation: Frank, Foresight News
Stylus is likely to be the most noteworthy product launched by Arbitrum so far. It is time for the market to realize why Stylus is so important to the entire blockchain industry.
In recent years, every user has been happy with the process of getting airdrops just for testing the protocol, but in recent times, more and more users have entered with high expectations, but in the end they get nothing.
This seems to be gradually evolving into the end of the entire on-chain user growth story. What’s worse, developers are also leaving this fake jungle woven by on-chain users because it is difficult for projects to retain these “Farmers” after the token generation event (TGE).
The consequences of developers leaving are serious because it means you won’t see any new innovations, and new projects will just copy Aave, Compound, and GMX and end up in a dead end.
So what is the solution? How do you incentivize developers to stay, and how do you attract new developers to the Web3 space?
A simple and crude way is to issue incentives to developers who are active in the Web3 developer community. Some projects have already begun airdropping tokens to developers, which is a very positive thing for the entire field.
But the second approach is a more long-term solution, that is, the project should lower the entry barrier for novice developers - even if they are only familiar with basic languages such as C or C++, they should be able to easily integrate into the field of Web3 development.
Imagine that a C language developer can build DApp applications on EVM. This would undoubtedly be very cool, right?
Let’s continue discussing ways to lower the barrier to entry for new developers. For example, Arbitrum Stylus is building a C-compatible virtual machine (VM) that allows developers to code in C, C++, Rust, and any language that can be pre-compiled into WASM.
At the initial stage, they have opened support for Rust and C languages.
According to statistics, there are 12 million developers worldwide who are familiar with the Rust language. Do you know how many people understand Solidity syntax?
Less than 100,000.
In other words, Arbitrum Stylus provides access to a massive community of Rust and C developers who can start deploying applications from day one… and now it will be easy for these developers to deploy their projects on Arbitrum.
However, Arbitrum Stylus not only allows non-Solidity developers to code and deploy DApps, but also increases execution efficiency by 10 times and memory expansion capabilities by 50-100 times by supporting optimized WASM binary code.
It is worth noting that Arbitrum also uses Nitro anti-fraud proof technology to verify the accuracy of code compiled from C/Rust to WASM.
Stylus can be seen as a natural extension of Nitro’s anti-fraud proof technology, which can not only split the verification of execution history, but also verify any WASM program deployed by developers.
With the advent of Stylus, developers can use EVM to build memory-intensive applications such as predictive models, complex generative art, and on-chain machine learning. With Stylus, artificial intelligence can also be explored on EVM with better performance.
Additionally, any DApp built with Stylus will be interoperable with Rust DApps, meaning that DApps in the Arbitrum ecosystem can interact seamlessly with Solana.
As of the time of writing, the Arbitrum Stylus testnet is now live, and you can use the Stylus SDK to start building DApps in C and Rust.
Stylus is expected to be launched on the mainnet in the next 3-5 months. It will be the biggest upgrade of Arbitrum, benefiting its future development of large-scale adoption by developers and users.
