Offchain Labs, the developer of Ethereum scaling solution Arbitrum, has announced raising $120 million in a Series B funding round. It was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and also saw the participation of Polychain Capital, Ribbit Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Pantera Capital, among others.
Of late, the rollup network called Arbitrum One has garnered significant traction and has managed to build up notable support since it beta-launched to developers in May this year. Since then, approximately 400 teams have reportedly signed up for access.
Ethereum’s perennial inefficiencies and the rise of other scaling solutions
Besides, Ethereum’s scalability problems and network congestion have been topics of extensive debate and discussion. Enormous transaction times and fees have continued to burden developers despite the fact that markets surrounding the ecosystem have surged over the past year.
As a matter of fact, the core developers of the Ethereum ecosystem have attempted to solve these problems with upgrades to the protocol itself, in the short term, however, there seems to be no easy way out. Hence, it is only natural that the second layer solutions are being explored.
Needless to say, Arbitrum has emerged as a promising solution with the capability to handle more transactions than Ethereum at lower costs. It processes transactions on a sidechain that leverages optimistic rollups tech and then regularly conducts them to the main Ethereum blockchain in batches.
Arbitrum’s Mainnet beta
Until now, only developers could release and test their applications on Arbitrum’s platform. But the mainnet launch has now enabled the community members to interact with decentralized apps [DApps] on it. The official announcement read,
“We’ve committed to a fair launch, and today we’re delivering on that commitment by opening up to users for all projects simultaneously. But even though we’re removing the whitelist today, this doesn’t mean that every project will choose to go live immediately. The Arbitrum One Portal is the best place to track the progress of current and upcoming launches on Arbitrum.”
Arbitrum happens to be the first scaling solution by Offchain Labs, and the initiative is working on other solutions to scale Ethereum. Even as the release is a notable milestone, Arbitrum One is still in beta. The team behind the project asserted that they would be closely observing the rollout and “maintaining the ability to do fast upgrades and even pause the system should it become necessary.”