High throughput scaling: today and tomorrow

Offchain Labs
Offchain Labs
Published in
3 min readNov 12, 2024

Offchain Labs is committed to building and innovating in ways that will enhance scalability, performance, and usability across the Arbitrum ecosystem. Over the past year, we have been carefully listening to the ecosystem’s feedback on the value of natively enabling vertical scaling and throughput capability increases.

As detailed in our latest technical roadmap, Offchain Labs’ recent focus has been bringing exciting, value-differentiating technologies, such as BoLD, Stylus, and Timeboost, to life. However, we wanted to assure the community that we are also actively working towards relieving throughput constraints and scaling to meet the demand for EVM blockspace through vertical scaling.

Future-oriented scalability: A focus on alt-clients and beyond

Nitro, the tech stack that powers all Arbitrum chains today, is engineered to be opinionated and purpose-driven. It is explicitly tailored to meet the needs of Layer-2 solutions. Nitro’s architecture is intentionally designed to allow for faster blocktimes, cheaper transactions and a more efficient EVM. This enables the unique customizations Orbit teams are making today and is the reason why Offchain Labs was able to ship Arbitrum with fraud proofs on day one.

At present, hardware and software optimizations enable blockchains to handle high transaction volumes with speed and reliability. But as Layer 2 (L2) demands evolve, our engineering approach is evolving right along with them. Offchain Labs is now in the process of testing the reorientation of Nitro’s development to support alt-client solutions — as stated in the technical roadmap.

Our objective in this work is straightforward: Alt-client development will be a top priority for 2025 as Offchain Labs continues to contribute to the expansion of Arbitrum’s capacity and capability to support the growing ecosystem of projects. We are excited to work with client teams to build the path for an ultra-high-throughput future for Arbitrum chains.

Currently, the Offchain Labs engineering team is evaluating Reth, Erigon, and Nethermind as alt clients — in parallel with Geth optimizations and improvements. Although we are still in the early stages of this process, we intend to keep the following objectives in mind:

  • Performance improvement (i.e., throughput increases)
  • Customizability opportunities
  • Reduced node operating costs
  • Alignment with the broader Ethereum ecosystem
  • Enhance ecosystem security and client diversity

From what we have gathered so far, our engineering team is leaning towards a Reth implementation, but we are approaching this decision with careful due diligence to determine what is the optimal long-term choice.

Erigon remains an appealing option, particularly as a more accessible solution for immediate archive node optimizations. If our evaluations show that Reth is the right path forward, we will share the data and reasoning behind our decisions transparently.

Meanwhile, we have reviewed publicly published benchmarks from the Nethermind team showing that their client is highly performant.

This update reflects Offchain Labs’ intent to stay agile, adaptable, and future-ready. Whether through Reth, Erigon, Nethermind or a combination, we are committed to creating solutions that can enhance Arbitrum’s throughput and efficiency and aligning with Ethereum’s evolution. As always, we will keep the ecosystem informed and engaged as we continue this journey.

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Offchain Labs
Offchain Labs

Published in Offchain Labs

Initial Developers of Arbitrum, an Ethereum scaling solution

Offchain Labs
Offchain Labs

Written by Offchain Labs

We’re Building Arbitrum, a scaling solution for Ethereum. Learn more at https://offchainlabs.com/ and http://arbitrum.io/.

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