Arbitrum Day: Largest Ethereum Scaler Breaks into WASM Ecosystem

Offchain Labs introduces the testnet release of Arbitrum Stylus, a programming environment for Arbitrum (ARB) chains. It unlocks all the opportunities of popular EVM-compatible networks ti the developer communities of WASM-compatible languages. Besides cross-ecosystem compatibility, the new development makes Arbitrum Nitro operations faster and cheaper.

WASM developers can build dApps on Arbitrum Nitro as Stylus launches in testnet

Arbitrum Stylus, a programming environment for WebAssembly languages, goes live in testnet on Arbitrum Nitro. With this instrument, millions of C, C++ and Rust developers can deploy their dApps and tokens on Arbitrum (ARB) ecosystem blockchains without changing their codebases.

The novel instrument offers a new level of composability and modularity: with Arbitrum Stylus, a Solidity developer can easily call a Rust program or rely on another dependency in a different language. Also, for instance, a token contract written in Rust can be deployed to the EVM chain.

Arbitrum representatives stressed that this release is a landmark milestone in terms of blockchain accessibility as there are only 20,000 Solidity developers in the world, while millions are working on WASM languages:

At the heart of Stylus is EVM+: bringing the best of both EVM and WASM worlds. Developers still get all of the benefits of the EVM, including the ecosystem and liquidity, while getting efficiency improvements and access to existing libraries in Rust, C, and C++. All without changing anything about how the EVM works. EVM equivalence is no longer the ceiling, it’s the floor.

A major addition to the Arbitrum (ARB) stack was unveiled on Arbitrum Day (Aug. 31); Arbitrum One launched in mainnet two years ago, while Arbitrum Nitro kicked off on Aug. 31, 2022.

$20,000 bounty campaign kicks off at ETHGlobal

The new technical design allows non-EVM dApps to be operated faster and cheaper. Per the estimations of the Offchain Labs team, Arbitrum Stylus allows for 10x improved computation and 100x improved memory usage.

This, in turn, paves the way for previously unseen use cases for the blockchains of the Arbitrum (ARB) ecosystem:

Cryptography libraries can now be deployed as custom precompiles, permissionlessly. RAM-intensive generative art libraries, bringing existing games written in C++ on chain, and compute-heavy AI models all become more accessible.

To introduce new development to the global Ethereum (ETH) community, Offchain Labs starts a $20,000 bounty program. It will go live at ETHGlobal in New York on Sept. 22, 2023.

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In the coming weeks, Arbitrum Stylus will be audited by the Trail of Bits Web3 cybersecurity team, Offchain Labs statement goes.