As 2023 came to a close and we enter the new year, OffChain Labs shared that they believe it’s a great opportunity to look back at all of the progress they’ve made.
Offchain Labs introduced new products to the broader industry, while continuing their mission to “make Ethereum an inclusive and accessible platform for all.”
At Offchain Labs, core to their mission and vision is continuing “to scale blockchain tech securely with a strong focus on optimizing user experience.”
Back in 2021, the Arbitrum Classic stack launched “with fraud proofs that utilized the Arbitrum Virtual Machine.”
In 2022 Arbitrum Nitro replaced “the Classic stack and introduced a Web Assembly (WASM)-based prover, which was more performant and further slashed fees. Nitro also enabled using Geth as the chain’s node leading to an even more compatible EVM experience — one that was exactly identical to developing on and using Ethereum.”
Nitro used WASM under the hood, but their ultimate goal “was to take this one step further and expose WASM capabilities to application developers, all without compromising the EVM experience for those who preferred it. EVM equivalence was never the end, rather the beginning, and in 2023 they made this a reality with Stylus.”
Arbitrum Stylus is “an upgrade to the Arbitrum tech stack allowing for developers to code not only in Solidity but Rust, C, C++, (and in principle can be extended to any language that can compile down to WASM). This is all completely opt-in as Stylus maintains complete interoperability with the EVM.”
EVM equivalence is the floor and it’s “not going anywhere.” But with Stylus, they began exploring how they can “supplement the EVM experience and make it even richer.”
They call this EVM+.
With 10x efficiency for computation and 100x efficiency for memory, Stylus will continue to scale Arbitrum and Ethereum, “slashing gas fees and increasing the chain’s capacity.”
Its scaling properties combined “with its additional language support are also poised to enable entirely new use cases that were previously unachievable on chain including the use of advanced cryptographic libraries, games with logic fully on chain, compute-heavy AI models, and lots more that was previously out of reach due to heavy computational requirements.”
The community has already “started building with Stylus,” the update noted.
Stylus is currently on testnet, but is “expected to be production ready in 2024 and we look forward to the Arbitrum DAO deliberating on deploying Stylus to Arbitrum One and Nova as well as the usage of Stylus in Orbit chains.”
In March, governance and control of Arbitrum One and Nova transitioned to the Arbitrum DAO. The Arbitrum DAO has “been a leader in both technological and governance decentralization and is the only generalized L2 to have achieved Stage 1 decentralization. Arbitrum governance is self-executing meaning the DAO votes on-chain and those votes themselves cause the outcomes to execute on-chain.”
To date, the Arbitrum DAO has “passed 11 proposals, the community has deeply engaged on over 400 discussion topics on the forum, and established a global presence with Ambassadors and DAO members in more than 130 countries.”
This year they launched Arbitrum Orbit– “a path to launching Arbitrum chains customizable with features, including custom gas tokens, modular DA layers, and the ability to adopt new technical upgrades and features like Stylus.”
Arbitrum Orbit is mainnet ready “with broad support from RaaS providers including Alt-layer, Caldera, and Conduit. Orbit Chains harness the power of Nitro, the fully built-out tech stack that drives Arbitrum’s public chains, such as Arbitrum One.”
The team says they are “actively contributing to the future of Ethereum, convinced that collaborative efforts will lead to a more unified and successful Ethereum.”
At Offchain Labs, they’re best known “for contributing to the Arbitrum technology stack, but they also contribute directly to L1 efforts through our development and funding of Prysm, the leading Ethereum consensus client.”
Beyond direct contributions to Ethereum, they have also “developed deep collaborations throughout the ecosystems in our efforts to scale Ethereum and its values.”
Most recently, they announced they research team’s collaboration “with Espresso systems to build Timeboost ordering protocol for Arbitrum transactions and contribute to Espresso System’s shared sequencing protocol.”
For more details, check here.