Your Chain, Your Rules: Offchain Labs’ Technical Roadmap to Fuel Arbitrum Innovation

Tl;dr Your Chain, Your Rules. As Arbitrum sees massive adoption by those building applications, infrastructure, and Orbit Chains, we’re hard at work on a variety of technical updates. These updates ensure that the usability, interoperability, and utility of Arbitrum continues to lead the adoption curve. Outlined below is the roadmap we intend to deliver, making your vision of blockchains a reality.

Your Chain, Your Rules.

As we set our (technical) course for the upcoming year, we at Offchain Labs remain steadfast in one of our core values: Your Chain, Your Rules. We continue to believe that blockchains are building a better internet, one with users and developers at the core. Using Arbitrum technology, builders can create powerful onchain apps and vibrant blockchain ecosystems. Users and institutions can safely steward themselves in a natively digital economy. Communities have the power to self-govern.

With this in mind, we encourage everyone interacting with Arbitrum chains to be visionaries, to stay curious, and to move forward with confidence knowing the tech just works.

The Roadmap

When we launched Arbitrum on August 31, 2021 (Arbitrum Day), we tackled the first major hurdle in blockchain adoption: scalability. Over the past three years, we’ve continued to scale, introduced entirely new capabilities, and created the most technically sound and open blockchain platform available.

As blockchain technology expands its reach across industries and gives rise to new ones, builders and users face the very challenges we’re committed to solving: fundamental usability, driving adoption, offering robust decentralization guarantees to users, and an infrastructure layer that just works.

We’re bridging the gap for builders and users by simplifying interactions with Arbitrum chains, driving wider adoption. Interoperability is at our core, allowing seamless navigation between chains using secure technology. We’re abstracting complex decision-making processes about ‘which stack or chain to use’ and creating the unified system.

It’s simple…Your Chain, Your Rules — giving you the freedom to innovate and build on a foundation you can trust.

DevEx, UX, and Adoption

To drive adoption we need to make building on blockchains more expressive, performant, and accessible for developers. Enter Stylus.

Stylus transcends the constraints of building on Ethereum by allowing developers to program in languages that compile to WebAssembly (WASM), like Rust, C, and C++.

Solidity has an important part of our history and an important part of our future as well; Arbitrum’s support for EVM isn’t going anywhere. At the same time, we must recognize that the number of Solidity developers and the corpus of existing code is far smaller than traditional programming languages. Stylus allows us to be more inclusive and welcome in a growing developer base without compromising the EVM experience for those who love it.

Stylus meets the growing need for performant and secure smart contract languages, while simultaneously expanding the design space for increasingly expressive onchain applications. In addition, Stylus is an efficient execution environment leading directly to gas savings for complex smart contracts. With Stylus, computation and memory costs can be significantly cheaper.

And you don’t have to wait…

If you’ve been around the Arbitrum ecosystem for a while, you know some of the biggest ecosystem launches happen on Arbitrum Day. (Well ok ok technically, Arbitrum Day falls on a holiday weekend in the US this year, so we’ll be observing it a few days late).

Arbitrum Stylus will go live on Arbitrum One and Nova mainnet on Arbitrum Day ushering in a new phase of innovation across the ecosystem and make the developer and user experiences even better. It’s the biggest execution layer upgrade to ever hit our industry.

Decentralization

The core ethos of blockchain technology, which values decentralization and trustlessness, is core to everything we build at Offchain Labs and our future development plans for the Arbitrum technology stack. We are working on a number of near-term and future developments to strengthen foundational infrastructure, ensuring decentralization remains not just a theoretical concept, but a practical reality in the ecosystem:

• BoLD (H2 2024): In addition to improved security, BoLD enables safe decentralized validation and moves Arbitrum closer to being a Stage 2 rollup, the final stage in L2 Beat’s stage definitions.
• Censorship Timeout (H2 2024): Building upon BoLD, Censorship Timeout limits the negative impact to Arbitrum chains from a repeatedly censoring or offline sequencer, potentially due to an attack. This provides stronger guarantees of censorship resistance to Arbitrum chains, and improves user fund access.
• Decentralized Sequencer (likely 2025): Decentralizing the Arbitrum sequencer is the last step in Arbitrum’s decentralization roadmap. A decentralized sequencer distributes the responsibility of transaction ordering across a broader, decentralized network of participants, reducing the risk of censorship attacks and enhancing reliability.

At Offchain Labs, we believe in the core ethos of blockchain tech and build products for decentralized adoption. The features mentioned in this post can be adopted by Arbitrum Orbit chains when available, or the Arbitrum DAO can vote in any or all of these technical upgrades to the chains it governs (Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova).

Interoperability and Horizontal Scaling

The introduction of Arbitrum Orbit ushered in a new era, empowering teams to innovate solutions for their own specific use cases. Arbitrum Orbit allows developers to customize their chains in any way they see fit. Our guiding principle remains: Your Chain, Your Rules. As builders focus on pushing boundaries, we’re committed to implementing significant performance and interop improvements by tackling fundamental engineering challenges. Our long-term strategy combines vertical and horizontal scaling efforts, enabling developers to accomplish more.

To unify the Arbitrum Ecosystem (Arbitrum Orbit, Arbitrum One, Arbitrum Nova, and Ethereum) we’re building towards frictionless interoperability between chains rooted in fast communication. Optimistic rollups offer the lowest cost and greatest flexibility, but their main barrier to horizontal scaling is the confirmation delay introduced by the challenge period. Longer confirmation time means that worst-case cross-chain communication may require days or alternatively placing trust in 3rd-parties.

We’re working on several interop solutions that will reduce these confirmation delays and enable horizontal scaling:

• Fast Withdrawals (Q3 2024): The imminent release of Fast Withdrawals will enable AnyTrust chains to bypass the confirmation delay, and settle to their parent chain within minutes. These fast confirmations will enable sibling L2s (or L3s) to communicate quickly with one another, thereby enabling developers to shard workloads and scale horizontally.
• Chain Clusters (2025): Looking ahead into next year, we plan to further expand the toolbox of developers to horizontally scale Orbit chains with the release of Chain Clusters. By allowing multiple Orbit chains to closely align their ecosystem and infrastructure, Chain Clusters can be used to reduce cross-chain communication time from minutes to near-instant.

Performance and Efficiency

From the very beginning, back in 2014, Arbitrum’s design has focused on performance and efficiency. Now, we’re looking to deliver the next iteration of enhancements in compute efficiency and performance with fundamental optimizations to execution.

• Multi-client support (H1 2025): Arbitrum Nitro is the node software that powers all Arbitrum-based chains and is built on Geth, a Golang implementation of the execution specification for L1 Ethereum. Since the debut of Arbitrum Nitro back in August 31, 2022, many new Execution Layer (EL) client implementations have launched or improved significantly — all with varying and unique value propositions and optimization targets. As the stability and quality of these alternative clients have improved, Offchain Labs has been working towards readying the Arbitrum stack to support alternative clients.

When we evaluate other clients, our main objective is to optimize at-head block production speeds which over time will (1) reduce the hardware cost of existing node operators and (2) pave the way for the safe increase of the speed limit (i.e. target throughput) on Arbitrum chains.

We have already begun testing and evaluating performance and benchmarks for several clients including Paradigm’s newly released Reth 1.0, Erigon 3.0, and Nethermind with the goal of delivering a production-ready multi-client implementation in 2025 and streamlining the process of adding additional clients down the road. Although our current analysis suggests that some alternative clients are still behind Geth in a few performance benchmarks, we believe that it’s prudent to ready the path for Arbitrum adoption as these clients further optimize.

• Adaptive Pricing (H1 2025): On current EVM chains, gas limits are set to prevent nodes from over-consuming the most scarce computational resource. This means that the gas limit for a chain is always a worst-case assessment, designed to protect against a transaction load that uses a node’s most constrained resource.

In contrast with a worst-case approach, Adaptive Pricing considers the actual resources being used and dynamically sets the gas limit accordingly. With Adaptive Pricing, the chain will only raise fees and throttle down resource consumption when a particular resource is approaching its actual limit, as opposed to a hypothetical maximum of what resources a different transaction might have used.

Adaptive Pricing will further enable scaling by allowing smart contracts to more efficiently use the full resources made available by nodes, and operate much closer to the true gas limit. Overall performance will increase without increasing the capacity of the network’s nodes. Adaptive Pricing also improves resilience versus extreme traffic patterns (e.g. inscriptions), where usage patterns change radically, but temporarily, by dynamically lowering gas limits only when necessary.

Zero-knowledge proofs

Offchain Labs is committed to scaling Ethereum with the best possible technology stack. By constantly working at the limits of available technology, we can identify improvements to deliver into our scaling solutions. While today it’s clear that from the perspectives of stability, maturity, cost, and security, Arbitrum Nitro is the best stack to scale Ethereum, our research team has identified several paths where we can incorporate productive uses of zero knowledge (ZK).

In his 2023 medium post as well as recent talks at EthCC and SBC, our Chief Scientist Ed Felten presented a hybrid construction for how ZK can be integrated into Arbitrum chains. One particular area of active research studying ZK:

• ZK+Optimistic Hybrid Proving: In the Arbitrum rollup and dispute resolution protocol, ZK proofs could eventually be used to instantly confirm assertions, acting as an optional and fast path to confirmation on the parent chain. Optimistic proving could still be used if ZK proofs are not provided. This enables users and developers on Arbitrum chains to access very fast native interoperability on an as-needed basis.

Always Looking Ahead

At Offchain Labs we are committed to creating solutions before problems arise. The monumental efforts to build three products ready for deployment this year — Stylus, BoLD, and Timeboost (click to learn more) — are proof points of Offchain Labs leading from the front. These innovations will make blockchains more accessible and support core values of decentralization.

Our deep bench of researchers, engineers, product managers, partnerships, marketers, and operations professionals push the boundaries of what can be done in this space. We build our products for you to innovate with the assumption that your infrastructure just works.

There is a lot more on the roadmap, but we wanted to share some of the mountains you’ll start to see moving in the near term.