Arbitrum Orbit is ready to launch, will it trigger the development of the L3 ecosystem?

The Arbitrum team announced today the completion of development preparation for the Layer3 network construction framework - Arbitrum Orbit, which is ready for release at any time. This article will introduce what Arbitrum Orbit is and what differentiates it from the existing OP ecosystem.

Arbitrum Orbit to be Released

Introduction to Arbitrum Orbit

On March 16th this year, when the Arbitrum team announced the ARB token airdrop plan, a hidden agenda was revealed - the launch of the Arbitrum Orbit project, expected to reshape the landscape of the scalability field. Today, the team has completed the development work.

Arbitrum Orbit is a product developed by the core Arbitrum team at Offchain Labs. It is a Layer3 development framework for developers, allowing them to easily create dedicated chains. Developers can customize network rules such as privacy, permissions, gas fees, native tokens, governance, and more, while enjoying Ethereum's network security.

To understand Arbitrum Orbit, one must first know that Arbitrum has had two main products in the past, which are:

• Arbitrum One Nitro: Implements Rollup, with security backed by Ethereum.

• Arbitrum Nova: Implements AnyTrust, similar to Arbitrum One, but with data availability stored off-chain. This protocol uses a data availability committee (DAC) to store transaction data, reducing transaction costs, making it more suitable for scenarios involving frequent transactions, such as gaming.

Arbitrum Orbit can be applied to existing ecosystems such as Arbitrum One, Arbitrum Nova, Arbitrum testnets, allowing developers to freely choose the appropriate network. They can benefit from the security of the network and infrastructure such as Stylus SDK, while also allowing developers to set network rules such as data storage methods and governance rules.

Related Projects

This low-threshold construction tool has attracted multiple projects to join the ecosystem, including the game-specific chain XAI and dozens of other projects, all waiting for the official launch of Arbitrum Orbit.

Recently, the modular public chain project Celestia also announced a collaboration with Arbitrum Orbit for service integration. In the future, developers can choose to store data on the Celestia blockchain in addition to Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova.

Different Ecosystem Philosophies of Layer2 Players

With the introduction of Arbitrum Orbit, it is evident that its strategy will differ from that of Optimism.

OP Stack

Another major player in Layer2, Optimism, has also introduced a development framework called OP Stack after issuing tokens this year. OP Stack focuses on assisting developers in building Layer2 networks, allowing for fast and secure data transfer between OP Mainnet, other Layer2 networks built using OP Stack, and having greater composability to create a Layer2 ecosystem.

Several projects have already collaborated, including opBNB from Binance and Base from Coinbase, with Base already having a TVL of $500 million.

Arbitrum Orbit

Compared to the Layer2 networks built by OP Stack, which are mostly projects of large exchanges and institutions aiming to create a strong ecosystem through composability, Arbitrum assists developers in establishing lower-threshold Layer3 dedicated chains, hoping to attract more developers of small projects into the ecosystem. Their mainnets, One and Nova, are expected to become governance chains in the future, with governance still controlled by Arbitrum DAO, similar to the Polkadot model, taking a different path from Optimism.

Returning to the Ecosystem

The author believes that regardless of how much network efficiency improves and costs decrease, ultimately, it will need to return to real-world scenarios of user usage. Therefore, this competition is gradually shifting from simply improving efficiency to horizontal development of building ecosystems and seeking cooperation, so it can be expected that Arbitrum and Optimism will release more developer-oriented tools in the future, make more integrations, and attract users to join the ecosystem.

Whether Arbitrum Orbit can make waves in the scalability field and maintain its advantages, remains to be seen and validated by the market.