Mainnet for Everyone
Today’s the day! We’ve opened up Arbitrum One for everyone and couldn’t be more excited to welcome you in! Today’s the culmination of years of work, but in many ways it’s just the beginning. Our vision of scaling Ethereum has been years in the making, but it’s today that we first get the opportunity to bring much-needed gas relief to the incredible Ethereum community. And if you’re one of those users who’ve been waiting patiently to use Arbitrum then hold tight and stay with us as we go over some important information. OK; LET’S GOOO!
Fair launch
So who else is coming to the party?
We have the honor of working with many world class teams on the shared mission of delivering scalable and affordable Ethereum applications. Since we opened Arbitrum One to developers in May, we’ve sent over 400 teams mainnet access instructions and have seen dozens of teams complete their deployments. We’ve committed to a fair launch, and today we’re delivering on that commitment by opening up to users for all projects simultaneously.
But even though we’re removing the whitelist today, this doesn’t mean that every project will choose to go live immediately. The Arbitrum One Portal is the best place to track the progress of current and upcoming launches on Arbitrum. We expect several projects to go live with us today and more projects to launch over the coming days and weeks. As projects go live, we will link directly to them from the portal and add new projects as we become aware of them. If you would like to get added to the portal you can submit your project here.
Mainnet beta and the path to full decentralization
We’ve said it a few times now, but it’s an important point so we’ll say it again. While today’s release is a significant milestone, Arbitrum One is still in beta. We’ll be closely monitoring the launch and maintaining the ability to do fast upgrades and even pause the system should it become necessary. As Arbitrum is a new and cutting-edge system, we believe that maintaining these controls for the time being is the responsible way to launch, but we also believe that it’s important that everyone understands this. If you’re not familiar yet, check out L2Beat, an excellent community resource for understanding the status and tradeoffs of various L2s. Full decentralization remains our ultimate plan for Arbitrum One, and in order to keep ourselves focused on that goal, we are committing to continue to use the ‘beta’ moniker until we achieve full decentralization.
We’ve also taken several more measures in today’s launch to make sure the network operates responsibly and securely. Overall, our goal is to ease into the launch while making sure that in doing so we remain fair and don’t prioritize some projects at the expense of others. Arbitrum is a community project, and our goal is to create a home for everyone.
Speed limit
Most notably, today’s launch will have a speed limit of 80,000 arbgas per second. For those who have no intuition about what that number means 🤣, we’ve chosen that number so that the capacity of Arbitrum One in the post-launch period will roughly match the current capacity of Ethereum L1. We intend to increase the speed limit over time as the system stabilizes and we continue to increase performance.
Transactions on Arbitrum will be significantly cheaper than Ethereum L1, but it’s important to note that if the network’s capacity is reached, then L2 can congest and fees can rise. A core goal over the coming weeks and months will be to work to sustainably increase these limits.
Whitelist be gone!
We have removed restrictions on who can transact with the network, but we will continue to have a whitelist in place for adding new tokens to our bridge and being an active validator until the ecosystem further matures. If your project has a token that you wish our bridge to support, please get in touch with us and we’ll happily work with you to add it. Our goal with this limitation is to protect users and ensure that it will be easy to recognize which L2 tokens correspond to their L1 counterparts. We have also secured commitments for several highly reputable validators to validate Arbitrum, and stay tuned for upcoming announcements on this.
Pausing and fast bridging
In the event that anomalous activity or a potential security incident is detected on the network, we may pause the network. Our first commitment is to the security of user funds, even if this comes at the expense of full uptime.
Arbitrum, like all Optimistic Rollups, has the characteristic that it takes roughly a week for withdrawals to be confirmed. While this is a UX drawback, it also gives us confidence that funds will remain within the system for a week and gives us time to pause and respond to potential security events should they occur. Fast bridging protocols can negate this affordance, and we’ve therefore recommended that all fast bridging solutions limit their liquidity in the early days. If you are offering a fast bridging solution and we haven’t yet discussed this, please feel free to reach out!
Bug bounty
As an additional layer of security diligence ahead of today’s launch, we have announced our public bug bounty program managed by Immunefi. If you think you’ve found a bug in Arbitrum, please promptly submit it and we will quickly respond and reward you for your efforts in line with the criteria set out in the bug bounty program.
Bridging assets
Alright, so you’re ready to bridge over some assets and start using your favorite dapps on Arbitrum. As Arbitrum is still early software and we’re rolling out gradually, we recommend that you limit your deposits to modest liquidity for the time being.
But where do you begin? First head over to the Arbitrum One portal, and make sure you’ve downloaded a wallet that supports Arbitrum, if you don’t have one already. Once your wallet is all set up, we’ve created a bridge tutorial to help you transfer assets over the bridge and start using dapps. ETH is the native currency in Arbitrum, so in order to transact, you’ll need to bridge over some ETH.
What’s next?
Over the coming months and weeks, we’ll continue to monitor network usage, improve stability and performance, and gradually increase our transaction cap over time. We also have some very exciting features that we’ll be adding over time that will further improve on Arbitrum’s developer experience.
Thank you (yes, you!)
So many people have been instrumental in making today’s launch possible, and we are humbled and grateful for all of the support that we’ve received. First and foremost, we need to thank our incredible team. Our team is small but mighty and extremely passionate about our critical mission of scaling Ethereum. The only drawback of our team is its modest size, so if you’re as passionate about scaling Ethereum as we are, please apply to join us today!
We’re also fortunate to be backed by some of the best investors in the space who have shared our vision and believed in our mission from an early stage. Today we announced that we have closed $120m in new funding from Lightspeed, Pantera, Polychain, Redpoint, Ribbit and other excellent partners, and we intend to continue to invest strongly in building our team and bringing Ethereum to the masses at scale.
But, we saved the best for last, and that’s each and every community member. You’ve waited patiently and cheered us on and helped us understand how critical the work we’ve been doing is. There’s a lot of work left to do, so please stay with us, bring us helpful feedback and tell us about desired features, and join our thriving community. We would not be here without your support. Thank you and enjoy your Arbitrum journey 💙.
