Ethereum L2 rollup, Arbitrum has announced that it will be launching a beta version of the mainnet this month that will open its services to ordinary users who want to use advanced project publishing solutions. So far, Arbitrum has run in a sandbox and more than 250 projects have applied to be built using the optimistic aggregation technology. Arbitrum enables users to conduct transactions almost instantly with negligible fees and is designed for bulk adoption.
Arbitrum to Launched This August
Offchain Labs, the company behind the Arbitrum project, stated that it is very difficult to determine where to start its rollup and to coordinate the start and deployment with multiple projects, including stablecoin companies in the process. It says:
“When deciding when to launch, we had to weigh many factors. We’ve been hard at work over the last few months coordinating deployments with hundreds of projects and bridging many of the most popular stablecoins and tokens onto Arbitrum.”
However, it will not start at full capacity yet. Offchain Labs stated that while the network is available to all users, the network will “set initial limits on the amount of activity” and promise to increase those limits over time as the solution matures.
Optimistic Commercial Rollup Solutions
Technically, arbitrum is a rollup, an extended structure of the second layer. When it conducts its operations outside of Ethereum’s L1 network, it publishes information as evidence of those operations. Arbitrum is one of the earliest Optimistic commercial rollup solutions. This means that the network assumes that the operation is always honest and does not perform any calculations to prove correctness. When conducting possible fraudulent transactions, there are safeguards in place to punish the issuer.
Recently, Reddit selected Arbitrum to place its community points system. It’s not the only optimistic rollup solution under development, however. Optimism is another similar L2 rollup that is currently in testing phases. Uniswap has also introduced an integration with Optimism that allows users to conduct fund transactions through the gateway on its website.
Arbitrum also faces competition from the scaling solution polygon (MATIC). Although Polygon is more of a side-chain solution, both Arbitrum and Optimism use optimistic rollups.
