Offchain Labs, the original developer of Arbitrum blockchain and Stylus, announced the mainnet launch of Arbitrum Stylus, a backward-compatible virtual machine designed to remove common barriers to decentralized app (DApp) development for Web3.
Stylus allows developers with varied coding skills to build on Arbitrum using the familiar WebAssembly (WASM)-)-compatible languages. The convergence is expected to spur the launch of powerful Web3 applications and use cases with low gas fees.
Speaking to Cointelegraph at the Korea Blockchain Week conference on Sept. 3, Offchain Labs co-founder and chief scientist Ed Felten explained that Stylus unifies the two primary ways of writing smart contracts on blockchains: Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and traditional programming languages such as Rust, C and C++.
Offchain Labs co-founder and chief scientist Ed Felten at Korean Blockchain Week. Source: Cointelegraph
Felten explained how layer-2 scaling solutions are starting to move away from Signaling from the limitations of the EVM by adopting additional capabilities from new languages:
“Now developers have the choice to develop their contracts in either style, and they’ll all run together on the same chain in a way that is fully interoperable, fully composable.”
He added that Stylus’ multi-language support encourages developers to build on Arbitrum with “whatever tool makes the most sense for them.”
Stylus programs test run 70 times faster than EVM
In a parallel announcement, Steven Goldfeder, CEO and co-founder of Offchain Labs, added that developers can use Stylus to expand their current market offerings.
In addition to onboarding a new set of standard developers into Arbitrum, Felten said that some Stylus programs have outperformed programs built on EVM, especially those demanding high computation power:
“We’ve seen applications where it’s up to 70 times faster, meaning you can do 70 times as much within the gas limit. And that unlocks some types of things that were either too expensive or not even possible at EVM. ”
As a result, Stylus DApps can do more transactions within the gas limit and, as a result, reduce the overall cost, thus meeting the need for performant and secure smart contract languages while simultaneously expanding the design space for onchain applications.
Future efforts to unite the developer community
Offchain Labs further plans to integrate other popular protocols, such as ZK-proofs, into Arbitrum, which currently demands high costs and computation. Sharing his version of the future of Web3, Felten added:
“I think the future is a hybrid protocol that includes some optimistic elements and some ZK elements that, in fact, that is better than either pure optimistic or pure ZK.”
He believes that a hybrid protocol will be most economically viable in a non-specialized environment. Therefore, Felten anticipates that Stylus' cost reduction will allow the development of more sophisticated decentralized finance (DeFi) applications.
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