Your Chain, Your Rules, with Arbitrum Orbit

Unlock blockchain potential with the Universe of Chains

Blockchain technology has been rapidly evolving, bringing incredible opportunities for growth and innovation. However, as the space expands, developers and users are seeking ways to make blockchain technology more accessible, secure, and decentralized.

Arbitrum Orbit’s technology stack is an essential piece in blockchain scaling. Developers can create and customize their chains without getting bogged down in technical complexity, reducing the work they need to do to get to where they want to go. Users reap the benefits of faster, more cost-efficient transactions compared to using Ethereum.

At Offchain Labs, we know that there are various types of onchain applications that developers want to build and that there is never a one-size-fits-all solution for enabling these applications and the innovation teams are striving for. Using Orbit, we have adopted the mantra of Your Chain, Your Rules to ensure chain developers can adapt and evolve their applications based on their unique needs and innovate in a way that works for them.

This means that regardless of whether developers are building a large-scale application or designing a dedicated ecosystem, Orbit will provide the developer with more ownership and customizability over the chain. This will include increased speed, custom gas tokens, governance tools, various validation strategies, novel ways to deal with MEV, smart contracts in new languages, and more. Each Orbit team will have the power to decentralize and grow however it wishes.

With all of this in mind, we want to share a little more about Arbitrum Orbit’s current state, our vision for its future, and what this means for current and prospective teams using Orbit chains.

Phase one, *rapid expansion*

Since its launch in 2023, Arbitrum Orbit has sparked an explosion in innovation across Ethereum. Pioneering blockchain developers quickly recognized the opportunity to build new, performant, and feature-rich rollups, resulting in industry-defining app chains and onchain ecosystems. As of October 1st, 2024, the Orbit ecosystem has seen over 30 chains reach mainnet, with over $200 million in TVL bridged.

The Orbit ecosystem contains the full breadth of blockchain applications and use cases such as gaming, DeFi, Consumer, DePin, RWAs, and more.

Applications that have built a solid user base and product are now evolving and require more bespoke designs and systems to serve their growing needs. This is what Orbit is designed to do. With Orbit, developers can aggregate their services into a single chain instead of dealing with the complexity of deploying across multiple blockchains. This allowed them to build faster, more scalable, and interoperable applications.

Phase two, the *evolution*

Following the explosion comes the evolutionary phase of the Orbit ecosystem, and we are looking to improve in a handful of areas over the coming months.

Customizability

Orbit chains are designed so that it is possible to choose the exact technology stack you would like to use. This means we want to provide more customizable offerings for Orbit chain users. Some exciting developments that we are working on include:

• Expanding gas token offerings,
• Having the option to deploy a bridged form of USDC through EVM blockchains, with the possibility of having native issuance in the future and
• Access to the new transaction ordering policy that Offchain developed, Timeboost.

Decentralization

At the heart of what makes blockchain transformative is decentralization. BoLD, which stands for Bounded Liquidity Delay Protocol, will be an upgrade to the Arbitrum dispute protocol. It will enable anyone to validate the state of the chain and propose state roots to L1 Ethereum, making one great stride towards enhancing permissionless and decentralized validation and improving the security of withdrawals to L1 Ethereum.

As part of BoLD, a novel feature called Censorship Timeout will be enabled that improves the censorship resistance properties for Arbitrum Orbit chains — particularly L3s. Censorship Timeout introduces a way for the force inclusion window to be lowered following repeated or sustained sequencer censorship or downtime. Arbitrum Orbit chains get this benefit for free by adopting to use BoLD. Read more about this feature in this document.

DevEx

We want blockchain developers to be able to design and build highly customizable applications that meet their ever-changing needs. For this reason, we’re looking to offer flexible tools and a customizable tech stack to enable them to create more specialized and innovative solutions.

Alongside improvements to the Orbit Admin UI (user interface) and the Orbit SDK (software development kit), the Stylus SDK is another central area of focus for us at Offchain Labs.

Stylus enhances smart contract development on Arbitrum by allowing developers to write contracts in any language that compiles to WebAssembly, such as Rust, C, and C++. This flexibility lets developers use familiar, efficient, and secure programming languages while also allowing them to access tooling and libraries belonging to new languages supported by Stylus, unlocking new possibilities.

Native interoperability

As the universe of chains develops, native interoperability becomes essential. An important aspect of Orbit is its interconnectivity, which enables networks and services to flow effortlessly.

To help ensure that this becomes a seamless reality, we’re working on multiple interoperability solutions, including:

• Layer leap: This feature will allow users to move funds directly from Ethereum to an L3 Orbit chain in one transaction. This helps with interoperability by reducing the number of transactions and overhead required from the end user when using app chains on L3s.
• Fast withdrawals: These will be available for Arbitrum AnyTrust chains. They will enable Orbit chains to reach fast finality and process transactions in as little as 15 minutes instead of the initial 7-day challenge period. This will be achieved through a committee that must unanimously approve the transaction. Fast withdrawals will help with interoperability because it reduces the time it takes to transfer assets between Orbit chains, making cross-chain interactions a tad more seamless.
• Chain mesh: Previously chain clusters. We are working on a native solution for Arbitrum chains to allow trustless, faster communication and settlement times. This innovative approach will enable Orbit chains to work together more efficiently, optimizing the use of resources and enhancing security.

Performance

In addition to allowing developers to write code in additional programming languages, Stylus is designed to optimize performance by introducing a co-equal virtual machine completely interoperable with the EVM that is designed to execute WASM instead of EVM bytecode. WASM languages such as Rust can provide significantly better performance and efficiency for computationally intensive applications. This makes it possible to do previously unfeasible operations, such as various types of on-chain proof verification.

We are also looking to invest in alternative client implementations to scale Arbitrum Orbit chains vertically, bringing further customizations to Orbit chains and allowing further modularity.

Looking ahead

We envision that the future of Orbit chains will resemble closely connected constellations or meta-structures that bring together multiple blockchain networks into a cohesive, interconnected ecosystem. Arbitrum technology will connect these constellations and ensure they remain highly interoperable while serving a specific community or function.

With this roadmap, Arbitrum Orbit is well-positioned to lead the next phase of blockchain innovation, empowering developers, users, and ecosystems to thrive in an ever-evolving, decentralized world.