This article aims to introduce the roadmap planned by Offchain Labs to help more developers and innovators turn the blockchain vision into reality.
Abstract: Your chain, your rules. As Arbitrum is increasingly adopted by applications, infrastructure, and Orbit Chain builders, we are working on multiple technical updates. These updates are aimed at ensuring the availability, interoperability, and practicality of Arbitrum to continue driving the trend of widespread adoption. This article aims to introduce the roadmap we plan to implement to help more developers and innovators turn the blockchain vision into reality.
Your chain, your rules
As we plan the (technical) direction for the coming year, Offchain Labs has always adhered to one of our most important core values: your chain, your rules.
We have always believed that blockchain is building a better internet, one that is user and developer-centric. With Arbitrum technology, builders can create powerful on-chain applications and vibrant blockchain ecosystems. Users and institutions can securely self-manage in the native digital economy, and communities have the power of self-governance.
With this in mind, we encourage everyone interacting with the Arbitrum chain to have a long-term vision, to stay curious, and to move forward with confidence, as our technology operates in accordance with this principle.
Roadmap
When we launched Arbitrum on August 31, 2021 (Arbitrum Day), we solved the first major obstacle in blockchain adoption: scalability. Over the past three years, we have continuously expanded and introduced new features, creating the most technically reliable and open blockchain platform.
As blockchain technology expands across various industries and gives rise to new ones, builders and users face various challenges: basic usability, driving adoption, providing strong decentralized guarantees for users, and an effective infrastructure layer. These are the problems we are committed to solving.
By simplifying interaction with the Arbitrum chain, we aim to bridge the gap between builders and users, driving broader adoption. Interoperability is our core, allowing secure technology to seamlessly interact between chains. We are abstracting complex decision-making processes, helping users choose "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 foundation you can trust.
Developer experience, user experience, and adoption
To promote adoption, we need to make "building on the blockchain" more expressive, efficient, and accessible for developers. This is where Stylus comes in.
Stylus allows developers to use languages such as Rust, C, and C++ to develop WebAssembly (WASM), going beyond the limitations of building on Ethereum.
Solidity has played an important role in our development history and will continue to do so in our future, as Arbitrum's support for EVM will not disappear. However, we must recognize that the number of Solidity developers and existing code libraries is much smaller than traditional programming languages. Stylus allows us to be more inclusive, welcoming a growing community of developers while not compromising the experience for those who love EVM.
Stylus meets the growing demand for efficient and secure smart contract languages, while expanding the design space for increasingly expressive on-chain applications. Additionally, Stylus is an efficient execution environment that can significantly reduce the gas costs of complex smart contracts. With Stylus, computational and memory costs can be significantly reduced.
And you don't have to wait…
If you have been part of the Arbitrum ecosystem for some time, you will know that significant updates will be released on Arbitrum Day (although this year's Arbitrum Day falls on a holiday weekend in the United States, so we will celebrate a few days later).
On Arbitrum Day, Arbitrum Stylus will go live on Arbitrum One and Nova mainnets, ushering in a new phase of ecosystem innovation, and enhancing the developer and user experience. This is the largest execution layer upgrade in our industry's history.
Decentralization
The core idea of blockchain technology is decentralization and trustlessness, which is also the core of Offchain Labs' development and the future development plan of the Arbitrum technology stack. We are working on multiple developments to strengthen the infrastructure, ensuring that decentralization is not just a theoretical concept but a practical reality in the ecosystem:
BoLD (second half of 2024): In addition to improving security, BoLD also achieves secure decentralized verification, bringing Arbitrum closer to the final stage defined in the L2 Beat phase, Stage 2 rollup.
Review timeouts (second half of 2024): Building on BoLD, review timeouts limit the negative impact of repeated reviews or offline sequencers on the Arbitrum chain, which may be caused by attacks. This provides stronger anti-censorship guarantees for the Arbitrum chain and improves user fund accessibility.
Decentralized sequencer (expected in 2025): The decentralized Arbitrum sequencer is the final step in the decentralized roadmap for Arbitrum. Decentralized sequencers distribute the responsibility of transaction sequencing to a wider network of decentralized participants, reducing the risk of censorship attacks and enhancing reliability.
At Offchain Labs, we believe in the core principles of blockchain technology and are building products for decentralized adoption. The features mentioned in this article can be adopted when available on the Arbitrum Orbit chain, or the Arbitrum DAO can vote for any or all of these technical upgrades on the chains it governs (Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova).
Interoperability and Scalability
The launch of Arbitrum Orbit marks a new era, allowing teams to innovate solutions for their specific use cases.
Arbitrum Orbit allows developers to customize their chains in any way they see fit. Our principle has always been: your chain, your rules. As builders focus on breaking boundaries, we are committed to implementing significant performance and interoperability improvements by solving basic engineering challenges. Our long-term strategy aims to enhance both vertical and horizontal scalability, enabling developers to accomplish more tasks.
To unify the Arbitrum ecosystem (Arbitrum Orbit, Arbitrum One, Arbitrum Nova, and Ethereum), we are building efficient, frictionless cross-chain interoperability. Optimistic rollups offer the lowest cost and maximum flexibility, but the main obstacle to their horizontal scalability is the confirmation delay introduced by the challenge period. Longer confirmation times mean that cross-chain communication in the worst-case scenario may take several days or rely on third parties.
We are developing several interoperability solutions to shorten confirmation delay and achieve horizontal scalability:
Fast Withdrawals (Q3 2024): The upcoming Fast Withdrawals will allow the AnyTrust chain to bypass confirmation delays and settle to its parent chain within minutes. These fast confirmations will enable sibling L2 (or L3) chains to communicate quickly, allowing developers to share workloads and achieve horizontal scalability.
Chain Clustering (2025): Looking ahead to next year, we plan to further expand developers' toolkits by releasing chain clustering to horizontally scale the Orbit chain. By allowing multiple Orbit chains to closely align their ecosystems and infrastructure, chain clustering can reduce cross-chain communication time from minutes to almost instant.
Performance and Efficiency
Since its inception in 2014, Arbitrum's design has focused on performance and efficiency. Now, we aim to achieve the next iteration of computational efficiency and performance through foundational optimizations.
Multi-Client Support (H1 2025):
Arbitrum Nitro is a node software that supports all Arbitrum chain-based nodes, built on Geth, a Golang implementation of the Ethereum L1 execution specification. Since the debut of Arbitrum Nitro on August 31, 2022, many new Execution Layer (EL) client implementations have been launched or significantly improved, each with different value propositions and optimization goals. As the stability and quality of these alternative clients improve, Offchain Labs has been preparing the Arbitrum stack to support these alternative clients.
In evaluating other clients, our primary goal is to optimize the current block production speed, which will over time:
(1) Reduce hardware costs for existing node operators
(2) Pave the way for secure speed increases in Arbitrum chain's speed limits (i.e., target throughput)
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 delivering a production-ready multi-client implementation in 2025 and simplifying the process of adding additional clients in the future.
While our current analysis indicates that some alternative clients still lag behind Geth in certain performance benchmarks, we believe it is prudent to prepare for Arbitrum's adoption, as these clients will continue to optimize.
Adaptive Pricing (H1 2025):
On the current EVM chain, gas limits are set to prevent nodes from consuming scarce computational resources excessively. This means that the gas limit of the chain is always a worst-case assessment, designed to protect the most constrained resources of the nodes from the impact of transaction loads.
Unlike the worst-case approach, adaptive pricing considers the actual resources used and dynamically sets gas limits accordingly. With adaptive pricing, the chain increases fees and reduces resource consumption when specific resources approach their actual limits, rather than based on assumptions of the maximum resources other transactions might use.
Adaptive pricing will further enable scaling, allowing smart contracts to more efficiently utilize all resources provided by nodes and come closer to the actual gas limits. Overall performance will improve without increasing the capacity of network nodes. Adaptive pricing also improves resilience to extreme traffic patterns (e.g., mempool), where usage patterns undergo drastic but temporary changes, dynamically reducing gas limits only when necessary.
Zero-Knowledge Proofs
Offchain Labs is committed to expanding Ethereum with the best technology stack. By continuously working on the boundaries of available technology, we can identify improvements that can be integrated into our scaling solutions.
Currently, from the perspectives of stability, maturity, cost, and security, Arbitrum Nitro is clearly the best technology stack for scaling Ethereum. However, our research team has identified several paths that can effectively leverage zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs.
In a Medium article in 2023 and recent presentations at EthCC and SBC, our Chief Scientist Ed Felten proposed a hybrid structure to illustrate how ZK can be integrated into the Arbitrum chain, an area of research that is particularly active in ZK.
ZK+Optimistic Hybrid Proofs:
In the Arbitrum aggregation and dispute resolution protocol, ZK proofs can ultimately be used for instant confirmation claims as an optional fast path confirmed on the parent chain. If a ZK proof is not provided, an Optimistic proof can still be used. This enables users and developers on the Arbitrum chain to access extremely fast native interoperability as needed.
Looking to the Future
At Offchain Labs, we are committed to creating solutions before problems arise.
This year, the tremendous effort put into deploying three products (Stylus, BoLD, and Timeboost) has demonstrated the team's foresight. These innovations will make blockchain more accessible and uphold the core value of decentralization.
We have a strong team of researchers, engineers, product managers, partners, marketers, and operations professionals driving continuous exploration of the boundaries of Web3 and blockchain technology. We build products with the premise of providing you with infrastructure that runs smoothly, enabling developers and participants to innovate better.
There is more on our roadmap, but we hope to share more significant developments that are coming soon to help readers further understand our future plans.
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