What is Arbitrum Nitro? Arbitrum Nitro is the next update with the goal of further reducing transaction costs on the congested Arbitrum One network caused by the Odyssey program. So what is Arbitrum Nitro and how does it solve the problem of scalability? Let’s find out together in the article below.
To understand more about Nitro, people can refer to some of the articles below:
- What is Arbitrum (ARB)? Arbitrum Cryptocurrency Overview
What is Nitro?
Background of the Arbitrum One ecosystem
Perhaps anyone who has ever done retroactivity on Arbitrum will never forget the Arbitrum Odyssey event. Arbitrum Odyssey is a series of events to experience projects on the Arbitrum One ecosystem to receive rewards in the form of NFTs. In the first week, Arbitrum Odyssey was very successful, attracting a large number of participants, however, by the next week, the number of participants was too large.
Because there are so many people participating, this pushes transaction fees on the Arbitrum One network to very high levels, up to several dollars per transaction order. Because of this, the Arbitrum Foundation has officially postponed the Arbitrum Odyssey event until the Arbitrum One network successfully launches Arbitrum Nitro.
It can be seen that, with just one event, Arbitrum Odyssey exposed the disadvantages of the Arbitrum One network, which is that the network is not ready to receive a large number of users. At that time, the network had to process about 250K transactions on average every day. Up to now, after upgrading Arbitrum, Nitro can process many times more than Arbitrum with the same fee.
Overview of Arbitrum Nitro
Arbitrum Nitro is the investment upgrade of Arbitrum One since its inception, it has arrived earlier than expected due to Arbitrum Odyssey pushing this. Arbitrum Nitro will have improvements over Arbitrum One including:
- Arbitrum introduces a new prover that can help the Arbitrum network interact with Fraud Proof using WASM code. This means that tools on Arbitrum can be written and compiled using standard languages and tools in place of custom-designed languages and compilers on Arbitrum One.
- Integrate Geth directly into the Arbitrum Nitro network.
- Call data sent from Arbitrum to Ethereum will continue to be optimized and reduce capacity, which will lead to faster transaction speeds on Arbitrum and transaction fees on the network will also become cheaper.
- Enhancing EVM compatibility to the same level makes it easier for developers to extend their projects to Arbitrum and also makes the execution environment more optimized.
With the above positive changes, the advantages that Arbitrum Nitro brings include:
- For developers, it is a simple, optimized and familiar environment like the Ethereum network.
- For all users, there will be faster transaction speeds and cheaper transaction costs.
Development roadmap of Arbitrum Nitro
Arbitrum’s development roadmap is divided into 3 stages as follows:
- Nitro Devnet: In the same industry that introduced Arbitrum Nitro to the community, Arbitrum Nitro is already in the testnet stage (June 29, 2022). Developers will be given priority to experience first, then users can participate and give feedback to the platform.
- Arbitrum Rinkeby Migration: After devent is successful, the development team will bring Nitro to the Rinkeby testnet network, which can be said to be the final step before moving to the mainnet.
- Arbitrum One Migration: Is the final step to bring Arbitrum One to Arbitrum Nitro.
However, there will be no fixed timeline for each stage of Arbitrum Nitro’s development.
Distinguishing Offchain Labs’ Product Lines
Offchain Labs has built a diverse ecosystem of different technologies to suit projects and developers with different needs:
- Arbitrum One, Nitro & Stylus: These are Layer 2 platforms based on Optimistic Rollup technology, often suitable for Finance projects. Arbitrum One was the first version released then upgraded to Arbitrum Nitro and Arbitrum Nitro continued to upgrade to Arbitrum Stylus.
- Arbitrum Orbit: Are Layer 3 platforms built on the Optimistic Rollup platform above. Arbitrum Orbit has freedom of choice regarding scalability and data availability.
- Arbitrum Nova: A Layer 2 platform using AnyTrust technology with minimal security from Ethereum but with much greater scalability than using Optimistic Rollup.
It can be seen that each product built by Offchain Labs targets different market niches. Arbitrum with Optimistic Rollup technology is suitable for the DeFi segment, Arbitrum Nova is suitable for the NFT, Social and Gaming segments. Arbitrum Orbit will be suitable for Dapps specializing in NFT, Trading, Gaming and Social.
The Future Of Arbitrum Nitro
Arbitrum Nitro was born to solve problems for both developers and users with the goal of helping developers feel most comfortable when building and developing on the network, while users can also Benefit from optimized network scalability. Clearly, Arbitrum Nitro is a necessary development for the Arbitrum network.
However, Nitro is not the Endgame for Arbitrum because I firmly believe that as the number of users continues to increase, Arbitrum Nitro will become as expensive as what Arbitrum One faced, so we will definitely see many solutions. in the future such as upgrading Arbitrum Nitro or planning to build and develop a Layer 3 of its own.
Summary
Arbitrum Nitro plays an important role in Arbitrum’s development, but Nitro is certainly just one of the network’s upgrade paths. Hopefully through this article everyone can understand what Arbitrum Nitro is?