A is for Arbitrum. A is for August.
It’s been a few weeks since our last update, and we’ve been hard at work readying Arbitrum One for prime time. We’ve now given over 400 projects mainnet access, and dozens of them have successfully completed their deployments. We know that end users have been waiting eagerly for their chance to interact with their favorite apps on Arbitrum, and we’re excited to announce that we will be opening up to users late this month. Yes, August. (Yes, 2021 🙃).
As part of our fair launch strategy, every Arbitrum project that has completed their deployment will have the opportunity to open up to users at the same time. If you’ve been following us on Twitter or joined our Discord, we’ve done our best to keep you up to date on which projects have already deployed. But we know there’s been a lot of activity, and in order to help keep everyone up to date on what’s live on Arbitrum, we’ll be rolling out the Arbitrum One portal ahead of the launch so users will have a quick and easy way to access every app and service provider on Arbitrum.
Opening Arbitrum One to users is a massive step — for us, for the projects building alongside us, and for the entire Ethereum community. When deciding when to launch, we had to weigh many factors. We’ve been hard at work over the last few months coordinating deployments with hundreds of projects and bridging many of the most popular stablecoins and tokens onto Arbitrum. Our core engineering team has been working tirelessly to ensure the stability, performance, and security of the network and implement requested features. While there’s always more that we can do to broaden the ecosystem and improve performance, we believe that the time is now to launch with additional improvements implemented along the way.
We’re still finalizing the exact day which we’ll announce shortly, but we wanted to give developers and users alike a heads up so that they can adequately prepare. If you work on a project that has not yet completed your deployment, now would be a great time to do so if you want to be live on day one. For the remaining pre-launch time, we’ll be deprioritizing new feature requests and focusing on final testing and diligence.
But our work is far from done. We’ll be continuing our work post launch to onboard more projects onto Arbitrum, to further improve performance and reduce costs, and to work through a long list of requested features. If this sounds up your alley, please apply here to join us. Our team is a truly incredible group of people with a contagious energy and an unfettered excitement about building revolutionary technology, and we’re looking for more talented engineers to join our ranks.
And now, a few words of caution.
Opening up a general L2 is uncharted territory, and our guiding principle is to make sure that we do so responsibly and safely. This is still early software, and we will be operating Arbitrum with several guardrails in place for the time being. While we will do our best to ensure uptime, our core focus will be security and users should be prepared for downtime and outages in the early days that will decrease steadily over time.
Mainnet Beta. As discussed in previous posts, we will be maintaining upgradeability controls on Arbitrum that will allow us to continue to improve performance and respond quickly to any security incidents or unexpected behavior. We ask users to remain vigilant and promptly report any unexpected behavior to our team, and details of our public bug bounty program will follow. To keep ourselves honest, we will continue to use the beta moniker until the system has been fully decentralized.
Speed bumps. We will place initial limits on the volume of activity, and we will gradually raise these limits over time. It’s important to note that if these limits are approached, the system may congest and fees will rise until traffic reduces. We’re still finalizing the parameters and thinking through the optimal tradeoffs and will have more to say on this shortly.
Let’s GO! The era of Ethereum L2s is here and the time is now. Arbitrum will enable the Ethereum community to interact with just about all of their favorite dApps (and lots of new ones!) with reduced costs and ultra-fast response times, and we could not be more excited to be reaching this milestone together.
That’s all for now. Talk soon 💙
