Arbitrum (ARB) Review: Everything You Need to Know About Arbitrum

This article provides a detailed look at the Arbitrum project. We begin by exploring its key solutions, including Arbitrum One (a public rollup), Arbitrum

In the rapidly evolving landscape of cryptocurrency, new projects are continually emerging, aiming to revolutionize specific aspects of the industry. One such project is Arbitrum, a groundbreaking initiative focused on expanding the capabilities and efficiency of blockchain technology.

As interest in crypto investment surges, especially in the realm of Web3, more traders are venturing into the market. Commencing one’s investment journey can be an exciting step.

To provide a comprehensive overview, this article will delve into the intricacies of Arbitrum, examining its history, founders, key solutions, and the role of the ARB token in this ecosystem.

What is Arbitrum?

Arbitrum is a suite of Ethereum scaling solutions that allows developers to easily build roll-up chains and decentralized applications. In this article, we will be focusing on the Arbitrum One rollup chain, a public blockchain that is commonly referred to as “Arbitrum” within the crypto market.

What crypto users and investors may not realize is that Arbitrum is way more than just the single Ethereum-based L2 rollup. Let’s go through Arbitrum’s suite of blockchain solutions one by one:

History of Arbitrum Crypto

Arbitrum was created by Offchain Labs, which, on its official website, describes itself as the “initial developers of Arbitrum.” The company was founded in 2018 by Ed Felten, Steven Goldfeder, and Harry Kalodner.

Offchain Labs introduced Arbitrum in a blog post dated 15 April 2019. Arbitrum went live with its testnet in February 2020 before opening it up for all participants in October 2020. Arbitrum launched its mainnet for developers in May 2020. It was only in September 2021 that Arbitrum would open its mainnet to the public.

In August 2022, Offchain Labs launched an L2 blockchain protocol called Arbitrum Nitro to offer higher throughput, faster finality, and efficient dispute resolution. The same month, Offchain Labs launched Arbitrum Nova – a blockchain built using Arbitrum AnyTrust technology.

“With Nova operational we now have two separate Arbitrum chains running live on mainnet that together can support just about every blockchain use case. Nova will be the solution of choice for gaming and social applications, whereas Arbitrum One will continue to be the home for DeFi and many NFT projects.” – Offchain Labs.

In February 2023, Offchain Labs announced that it was developing a programming solution called Stylus, which would allow blockchain developers to deploy smart contracts written in Rust, C, and C++ on Arbitrum. For context, smart contracts on Ethereum and L2 rollups are programmed in a language called Solidity, which is compatible with the EVM software.

“From game development to social media, Stylus makes the transition to Web3 easier than ever. You won’t have to know Solidity to build on Arbitrum. Engineers can use the tooling they already know and love, regardless of their coding preferences,” explained Offchain Labs.

2023 was a big year for Arbitrum as the project launched the Arbitrum Foundation, the Arbitrum DAO and the ARB token to decentralize and adopt token governance for the Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova networks. On 23 March 2023, the ARB token was airdropped to Arbitrum users, investors, team, Arbitrum DAO and Arbitrum Foundation. ARB was distributed to Arbitrum users based on a points system that calculated historical user activity on Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova.

In October 2023, Offchain Labs launched Arbitrum Orbit for developers to build customized chains using Arbitrum technology.

About the Arbitrum Team

Offchain Labs is a blockchain research and development company and the core development team of the Arbitrum project. The company was founded in 2018 and is headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey, United States.

The company was incubated at Princeton University under the guidance of the university’s computer science professor, Edward Felten. By 2018, Felten and two graduate students, Steven Goldfeder and Harry Kalodner had developed an off-chain scaling solution called Arbitrum to boost the capacity of the Ethereum network. The trio licensed the technology from Princeton University, co-founded the company, and raised seed funding.

According to Crunchbase, Offchain Labs has conducted three funding rounds since 2019. The company raised $3.7 million in April 2019 in a seed fund round, which was led by crypto asset management firm Pantera Capital. Offchain Labs raised about $20 million in April 2021 in a Series A funding round. About four months later, Offchain Labs raised $100 million in a Series B, which valued the blockchain startup round at $1.2 billion. The series B round was led by Lights