Source: Offchain Labs, Medium; Translated by: Deng Tong, Golden Finance
summary
Your chain, your rules. As Arbitrum is heavily adopted by those building applications, infrastructure, and Orbit Chains, we are hard at work on various technical updates. These updates ensure that Arbitrum's usability, interoperability, and utility continue to lead the adoption curve. Outlined below is the roadmap we intend to deliver to make your blockchain vision a reality.
Your chain, your rules.
As we set the (technical) course for the coming year, Offchain Labs remains true to one of our core values: Your chain, your rules. We firmly believe that blockchain is building a better Internet, one that is centered around users and developers. Using Arbitrum technology, builders can create powerful on-chain applications and vibrant blockchain ecosystems. Users and institutions can safely govern themselves in a native digital economy. Communities have autonomy.
With this in mind, we encourage everyone interacting with the Arbitrum chain to be visionary, stay curious, and move forward with confidence knowing that the technology works.
Roadmap
When we launched Arbitrum on August 31, 2021 (Arbitrum Day), we addressed the first major barrier to blockchain adoption: scalability. Over the past three years, we have continued to scale, introducing entirely new features and creating the most technically sound and open blockchain platform.
As blockchain technology continues to expand its reach across industries and spawn new ones, builders and users face challenges that we are committed to solving: basic usability, driving adoption, providing users with strong decentralization guarantees, and an infrastructure layer that just works.
We are bridging the gap between builders and users by simplifying interactions with the Arbitrum chain, driving broader adoption. Interoperability is at our core, allowing for seamless navigation between chains using secure technology. We are abstracting the complex decision-making process about "which stack or chain to use" and creating a unified system.
It’s simple… your chain, your rules – giving you the freedom to innovate and build on a trusted foundation.
DevEx, User Experience, and Adoption
To drive adoption, we need to make building on blockchain more expressive, more efficient, and easier for developers to use. Enter Stylus.
Stylus goes beyond the limitations of building on Ethereum by allowing developers to program in languages that compile to WebAssembly (WASM), such as Rust, C, and C++.
Solidity is an important part of our history and an important part of our future; Arbitrum’s support for the EVM is not going away. At the same time, we must recognize that the number of Solidity developers and the amount of existing code is far smaller than traditional programming languages. Stylus allows us to be more inclusive and popular with the growing developer community without compromising the experience for those who prefer the EVM.
Stylus meets the growing demand for high-performance and secure smart contract languages, while expanding the design space of increasingly expressive on-chain applications. In addition, Stylus is an efficient execution environment that directly saves gas for complex smart contracts. With Stylus, computational and memory costs can be significantly reduced.
And you don’t have to wait…
If you’ve been following the Arbitrum ecosystem for a while, you’ll know that some of the biggest ecosystem launches take place on Arbitrum Day. (Okay, technically this year Arbitrum Day fell on a holiday weekend in the US, so we’ll be observing it a few days later).
Arbitrum Stylus will be available on Arbitrum One and Nova mainnets on Arbitrum Day, kicking off a new phase of innovation for the entire ecosystem, making the developer and user experience better. This is the largest execution layer upgrade our industry has ever seen.
Decentralization
The core philosophy of blockchain technology is to value decentralization and trustlessness, which is at the heart of everything we build at Offchain Labs and our future development plans for the Arbitrum technology stack. We are working on a number of near-term and future developments to strengthen the infrastructure and ensure that decentralization is not just a theoretical concept, but a practical reality in an ecosystem:
BoLD (H2 2024): In addition to improved security, BoLD also supports secure decentralized verification, bringing Arbitrum closer to Phase 2 rollups, the final stage defined by the L2 Beat phase.
Censorship Timeout (2H 2024): Building on BoLD, the censorship timeout limits the negative impact on the Arbitrum chain from repeated censorship or offline sequencers, which could result from an attack. This provides stronger censorship resistance guarantees for the Arbitrum chain and improves user funds access.
Decentralized Collator (likely in 2025): Decentralization of the Arbitrum Collator is the final step in Arbitrum’s decentralization roadmap. Decentralized Collators spread the responsibility for transaction ordering across a wider network of decentralized participants, reducing the risk of censorship attacks and improving reliability.
At Offchain Labs, we believe in the core spirit of blockchain technology and build products for decentralized applications. The features mentioned in this article can be adopted by the Arbitrum Orbit chain when it is available, or the Arbitrum DAO can vote to implement any or all of these technical upgrades for the chains it manages (Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova).
Interoperability and Scalability
The launch of Arbitrum Orbit opens a new era, allowing teams to innovate solutions for their own specific use cases. Arbitrum Orbit allows developers to customize their chains in any way they see fit. Our guiding principle remains: your chain, your rules. As builders focus on pushing the boundaries, we work to achieve significant performance and interoperability improvements by solving fundamental engineering challenges. Our long-term strategy combines vertical and horizontal scaling efforts to enable developers to get more done.
To unify the Arbitrum ecosystem (Arbitrum Orbit, Arbitrum One, Arbitrum Nova, and Ethereum), we are building frictionless interoperability between chains based on fast communication. Optimistic Rollups offer the lowest cost and greatest flexibility, but their main barrier to horizontal scaling is the confirmation delays introduced by challenge periods. Long confirmation times mean that cross-chain communication can take days in the worst case, or place trust in a third party.
We are working on several interoperable solutions to reduce these confirmation delays and enable horizontal scaling:
Fast Withdrawals (Q3 2024): The upcoming release of Fast Withdrawals will enable AnyTrust chains to bypass confirmation delays and settle to their parent chain in minutes. These fast confirmations will enable peer L2 (or L3) to communicate with each other quickly, allowing developers to shard workloads and scale horizontally.
Chain Clusters (2025): Looking ahead to next year, we plan to further expand the developer toolbox by releasing Chain Clusters to scale Orbit Chains horizontally. Chain Clusters can be used to reduce cross-chain communication time from minutes to near-instant by allowing multiple Orbit Chains to tightly integrate their ecosystems and infrastructure.
Performance and efficiency
Arbitrum has been designed with a focus on performance and efficiency since its inception in 2014. Now, we are looking to achieve the next enhancement in computational efficiency and performance through fundamental optimizations to execution.
Multi-client support (H1 2025): Arbitrum Nitro is a node software that provides support for all Arbitrum-based chains and is based on Geth (the Golang implementation of the Ethereum L1 execution specification). Since the debut of Arbitrum Nitro on August 31, 2022, a number of new execution layer (EL) client implementations have been launched or significantly improved - all with different unique value propositions and optimization goals. Offchain Labs has been working on getting the Arbitrum stack ready to support alternative clients as the stability and quality of these alternative clients improve.
As we evaluate other clients, our primary goal is to optimize for block production speed, which over time will (1) reduce hardware costs for existing node operators and (2) pave the way for safely increasing the speed limit (i.e. target throughput) of the Arbitrum chain.
We have begun testing and evaluating the performance and benchmarks of multiple clients, including Paradigm’s newly released Reth 1.0, Erigon 3.0, and Nethermind, with the goal of providing a production-ready multi-client implementation in 2025 and simplifying the process of adding additional clients in the future. While our current analysis shows that some alternative clients still lag behind Geth in some performance benchmarks, we believe it is wise to prepare for Arbitrum’s adoption as these clients are further optimized.
Adaptive Pricing (H1 2025): On current EVM chains, gas limits are set to prevent nodes from over-consuming their scarcest computational resources. This means that the chain’s gas limit is always a worst-case assessment designed to prevent transaction loads that use a node’s most constrained resources.
Compared to the worst-case approach, adaptive pricing takes into account the actual resources used and dynamically sets the gas limit accordingly. With adaptive pricing, the chain will only raise fees and lower resource consumption when a specific resource is close to its actual limit, rather than assuming a maximum value for the resource that other transactions may use.
Adaptive pricing will further enable scaling, allowing smart contracts to use the full resources provided by nodes more efficiently and get closer to the true gas limit. Overall performance will increase without having to increase the capacity of network nodes. Adaptive pricing can also improve resilience to extreme traffic patterns (such as inscriptions), where usage patterns change drastically but temporarily, dynamically reducing the gas limit only when necessary.
Zero-knowledge proof
Offchain Labs is dedicated to scaling Ethereum using the best technology stack. By continually pushing the limits of existing technology, we can find ways to improve it and incorporate it into our scaling solutions. While Arbitrum Nitro is clearly the best stack for scaling Ethereum today from a stability, maturity, cost, and security perspective, our research team has identified several avenues that can incorporate valid uses of zero-knowledge (ZK).
In a 2023 Medium post and recent talks at EthCC and SBC, our Chief Scientist Ed Felten introduced a hybrid construction for how ZK can be integrated into the Arbitrum chain. One specific active area of research looking into ZK is:
ZK+Optimistic Hybrid Proofs: In Arbitrum Rollup and dispute resolution protocols, ZK proofs can eventually be used to instantly confirm assertions as an optional fast path to confirmation on the main chain. If ZK proofs are not provided, optimistic proofs can still be used. This enables users and developers on the Arbitrum chain to access very fast native interoperability as needed.
Looking ahead
At Offchain Labs, we strive to create solutions before problems arise. This year we have put in a lot of effort to build three products ready for deployment - Stylus, BoLD, and Timeboost (learn more) - which is a testament to Offchain Labs being at the forefront. These innovations will make blockchain more accessible and support the core values of decentralization.
We have a large team of researchers, engineers, product managers, partners, marketers, and operations professionals who are constantly pushing the boundaries of what is possible in this space. We build products to allow you to innovate, provided your infrastructure works.
There’s a lot more on the trail map, but we wanted to share a few peaks you’ll start seeing in the near future.
