Arbitrum, Ethereum’s layer-2 scaling network will receive one of its most significant updates, which will speed up transaction processing, lower transaction costs, and make cross-chain communication between Arbitrum and ETH simpler. This upgrade is scheduled to take place on Wednesday.
In a tweet on August 29, Arbitrum reaffirmed the date of the “Nitro” update, stating that it will go into effect on August 31 at 10:30 AM Eastern Time and that a two to four-hour network outage period should be anticipated.
In order to aggregate huge volumes of transactions from Ethereum smart contracts and decentralized apps off-chain before submitting them to Ethereum, Abritrum is an Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution.
Nitro will be a “fully integrated, complete layer 2 optimistic rollup system” that builds on Arbitrum One with stronger fraud proofs, as well as newer sequencers, token bridges, and call data compression technologies, according to Offchain Labs’ GitHub account.
Ethereum’s Offchain Labs ArbOS update
Offchain Labs is a blockchain-based business founded in 2018 that develops a range of scaling solutions for ETH. The Arbitrum One network is the most famous network the company has implemented.
ArbOS (Arbitrum Operating System), which is now rewritten in the software programming language Go, was also updated by Offchain Labs. The updated version will enhance data compression, transaction batching, and cross-chain communication between Arbitrum and Ethereum, all of which will reduce expenses on the Ethereum mainnet.
Additionally, it was claimed in the document that the state of Arbitrum One “would be moved seamlessly” to Nitro, which, if done successfully, should completely eliminate the risk of a chain split.
Offchain Labs claimed that the Arbitrum Nitro upgrade would be “the most advanced Ethereum scaling stack” and that “Nitro would dramatically enhance network capacity and minimize transaction costs” in a paper published in April 2022, stating:
“Today, we throttle Arbitrum’s capacity, but with Nitro we’ll be able to release those controls and significantly up our throughput. And while Arbitrum today is already 90–95% cheaper than Ethereum on average, Nitro cuts our costs even further.”
Arbitrum has $936 million total value locked (TVL) on the network divided across 111 distinct protocols, with GMX, Stargate, Curve, and Uniswap among the most well-liked apps, according to decentralized finance (DeFi) aggregate DeFi Llama.