Interview with the founder of Arbitrum: A tabula rasa and three "Zhuge Liang" create the king of tens of billions of Layer 2

Original: “Interview with the Founder of Arbitrum: 3 People, 9 Years, 2 Billion Market Capitalization”

Interview & Writing: Jack, BlockBeats

As a scaler of the Optimistic Rollup track, Arbitrum was not favored at first. On one side is the Optimism team, which was created by core members of the Ethereum Foundation, and on the other side is the ZK Rollup track, which Vitalik calls the “final solution”, while Arbitrum is awkwardly sandwiched in the middle, that is, it does not have a close relationship with the foundation, and there is no condition for investors to “draw a pie”. From this point of view, Arbitrum can indeed be regarded as a dark horse in the Ethereum scaling track.

Since last year, despite the OP’s “token first-mover” advantage, Arbitrum’s TVL and on-chain activity have surpassed OP in the following period of time, and distanced themselves from it after the Odyssey. In February this year, the Arbitrum ecosystem became even more lively with the anti-airdrop expectations, with hot models such as GMX, Camelot, and Radiant constantly emerging, making Arbitrum the de facto “king of L2”. What’s even more surprising is that even after the end of the airdrop, the development of its ecology has not been extinguished, and even with the emergence of AIDOGE, a new round of meme frenzy has ushered in the crypto market.

The sustainable growth of the ecosystem is inextricably linked to the team’s efforts and path selection. From Arbitrum One to Nitro, the team is constantly looking for and solving the underlying challenges they face. Of course, Arbitrum didn’t get every step right. The “DAO Fundgate” in early April had a very negative impact on the entire crypto industry, with some even announcing that “DAO governance exists in name only”. Amid the industry spotlight and controversy, Arbitrum recently launched a new narrative of its own scaling, Stylus.

Where does the team behind Arbitrum come from? What do they think about the competition between Optimistic and ZK scaling, what is the origin of “DAO Funding”, and what is the new narrative of Stylus? BlockBeats interviewed Ed Felten, the founder of Arbitrum. (Related reading: From White House Dignitary to Crypto Pioneer, a Review of the Technical Career of Arbitrum Founder Ed Felten)

From the White House to Web3

Like many Web3 “Tier 1” projects, Arbitrum’s founder, Ed Felten, is from campus. The difference is that Ed’s experience before entering Web3 is even more legendary. In 2003, at the age of 40, Ed Felten became a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University, and two years later, he became director of the university’s Center for Information and Technology Policy (CIPT). From 2006 to 2010, he was elected to the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and subsequently appointed Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. One day in early 2015, Ed received a call from the White House and was invited to serve as the White House’s deputy chief technology officer.

Working at the White House changed Ed’s definition of many things. During his tenure, he no longer has more time to study his favorite blockchain technology, but has to spend more time and energy on policy research in AI education, AI military, and information security. Since stepping down from the White House, Ed has become an AI expert, and at a 2018 Computing Research Association summit, Ed commented that “blockchain is not as important as AI.” But in the same year, Ed founded Offchain Labs and officially entered the world of blockchain and Web3.

BlockBeats: Can Ed tell us a little bit about his experience?

Ed: I spent most of my career as an academic, a professor of computer science at Princeton University, and later a professor at the School of Public Policy. I’ve worked in the U.S. government three times, and for the last two years of the Obama administration, I was the U.S. government’s deputy chief technology officer, serving as a policy advisor to the president, working on a variety of technology policy issues. Around 2012, I started doing academic research in the field of cryptocurrency blockchain. In 2014, I started doing research on blockchain scaling, which was the work that first led me to Arbitrum. The initial birth of the idea behind Arbitrum happened in 2014, when I developed the idea of interactive fraud proofs in conversations about scaling.

But in early 2015, I was hired by the White House as the White House deputy chief technology officer. So I left my academic position and went to work at the White House for about two years. After the Obama administration left office, I returned to Princeton University and became a professor again. After that, I started thinking about what I should be doing research. One day, two PhD students, Harry and Stephen, came to my office and proposed to me to turn my 2014 idea into a practical product. So the three of us formed a core team and created an “academic version” of Arbitrum.

Ed Felten (second from right), who served as deputy chief technology officer at the White House, the source of the picture comes from the Internet

It took us about a year, and in the summer of 2018, we published a peer-reviewed paper on Arbitrum, which was the first publication on Arbitrum. That’s when we realized: we knew how to build something with business value, which solved the pain points of Ethereum users, namely Ethereum’s transaction fees and limited throughput, which were actually two sides of the same coin, so we decided to set up a company. This was the beginning of the Offchain Labs journey, and by the time we launched our first product on mainnet, it was already three years after that academic paper was published.

BlockBeats: Did you still have time to think about blockchain technology during your tenure in the White House?

Ed: There are still. My work spans all areas of technology and policy, and perhaps one of my biggest projects is driving policy progress on AI and machine learning. And of course I’ve tried to facilitate discussions about blockchain technology between different parts of the government, and I’ve done some work on blockchain technology, albeit very early. At that time, the technology was not developed enough to get a lot of attention from the top of the government, and that has changed somewhat, and I think the current government is paying a lot more attention to blockchain technology than it was in 2015 or 2016.

BlockBeats: You’re one of the first academics to focus on blockchain, but at an academic summit, you mentioned that blockchain as a technological innovation may not be as important as AI. Why did you finally choose blockchain as your entrepreneurial direction?

Ed: One of the most important reasons is that in my cryptocurrency research work, we found a technology that could be commercialized, that we could solve a problem that was important to a lot of people, and that we knew how to build a company that would make an impact. For me personally, that’s not the case with my research in artificial intelligence. In the field of AI, I study public policy issues, such as what the government should do, what large institutions should do, and what is best for the public. But I don’t really have the opportunity to start a company in the field because I don’t have the kind of innovation that can drive economic value in the field. So for me, there is no such thing as an opportunity in the field of artificial intelligence.

In 2018, Ed Felten gave a speech on AI technology at the Computing Research Association Summit, from the Internet

Perhaps from the long-term perspective of human history, the AI and machine learning innovations that are happening now may be more important than blockchain innovations. But from my personal vantage point, I can find opportunities in the blockchain space and make a business impact, but I can’t in the AI space. That’s why I chose to do Arbitrum instead of a “titular AI company”. Maybe in another universe, I can be an AI entrepreneur, but in this universe, blockchain is my best place to go.

“Remember the idea called Arbitrum?”

Like Ed himself, the idea for Arbitrum came from campus. In 2014, Ed came up with the idea of interactive fraud proofs, and he was already working on blockchain scaling back in the days when Ethereum was still unpopular. In September, several students were recommended by their teachers to design a blockchain project based on ED’s research. In the final class exhibition, three students in sweaters stood in front of the stage with their hands on their hips and explained to the students what “Arbitrum” was written on the whiteboard, and Arbitrum was born. Of course, it was only four years before Ed actually decided to make and commercialize Arbitrum.

BlockBeats: Interestingly, you started working on scaling options before Ethereum was known. Why did you choose the expansion solution as your research direction?**

Ed: I’ve worked on some other research topics related to Bitcoin, specifically on the economics and incentives of Bitcoin and consensus issues. But at the beginning of 2014, I became interested in the idea of smart contracts, where you can take a tool that used to be only possible to own and transfer tokens and turn it into a platform on which people can build new types of services and products. I realized that this brought together a range of different ideas that I had been focusing on in my academic work. On the one hand, it’s blockchain and this public, permissionless, trustworthy system, and on the other hand, it’s around provable and accountable computing, and that thinking stems from my work in public policy, where I’ve been trying to understand how technology-mediated public processes can be done in an open and accountable way.

I realized that smart contracts were the intersection of these things, so in early 2014, I had a lot of exciting ideas for smart contracts. While I can’t foresee what the Ethereum ecosystem will look like in the future, I have an idea that combining the idea of general-purpose computing with blockchain will lead to explosive innovation. However, as a computer systems researcher, it was clear to me that scaling would be an issue. Because the obvious way to do smart contracts, which is to have every node in your blockchain system execute every step of every smart contract, would be a big performance bottleneck and what got me interested in scaling smart contracts in early 2014.

At the time, it wasn’t clear whether Ethereum would be the “ultimate blockchain” to support smart contracts, but among the many candidates, Ethereum looked like the leading contender and the best bet at the time. And no matter which one of them wins, they will face scaling issues. Therefore, as an academic researcher, my goal is to identify real-world important problems early and try to develop solutions for them.

BlockBeats: How did the idea of Arbitrum come about?

Ed: Actually, the idea that first came to mind, the core idea of what we now call “interactive fraud proof,” was around what I came up with in February or March 2014. At that time, I was hosting a conference on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technology in my academic group at Princeton University. It was during this time that I came up with the idea for Arbitrum. For most of 2014, I hung a diagram on the whiteboard in my office at Princeton University illustrating interactive fraud proofs.

In September, my colleague Arvind started teaching a course on blockchain technology, and the students were given a course project where they had to create something based on blockchain. A group of students got together, Arvind approached me, I pitched them the idea of building an interactive fraud proof prototype, and the group built a very early version of Arbitrum that wasn’t entirely successful, but explored a lot of ideas. The name Arbitrum was actually coined by a student at a conference at the time, and it was a version zero of Arbitrum, a system that was in some ways completely different from the current Arbitrum.

Arbitrum’s final class display, the source of the picture comes from the Internet

Not long after that, I went to work at the White House, and when I came back to campus two years later, two PhD students, Harry and Steven, came up to me and said, “Hey, do you remember Arbitrum from there? Let’s make it into a product!” After that, we formed the company, and after a few iterations of the technology, we ended up with the product we have now. It has to be said that it has been a long journey.

BlockBeats: What did Harry and Steven like about the idea of Arbitrum?**

Ed: I think they’ve also seen what I’m seeing, which is that the scaling of the smart contract system is going to be a big issue, and the limited scale of Ethereum is going to be a bigger and bigger pain point for users, which is number one.

Second, in our understanding of Arbitrum, there is a convergence of ideas that can be built into something larger and more valuable. So almost from the first day they came to my office, the three of us had a very unanimous understanding not only of the potential of this technology, but also of the problems that we need to solve in order to go from an idea to a complete system that becomes a bridge to solve people’s problems. So I think we have that vision together. It was because of the three of us who shared this vision and were willing to put the time and effort into it that really changed my mind, from a great idea that I hoped would one day turn into a project, to one that we are now working on together.

The other point I would like to make is that when I just came back to academia from a government job that was far away from academia and was very stressful, I wanted to take a moment to stop and think. Because the White House experience has changed my worldview, and I have perspectives that I didn’t have before, I also wanted to stop and think about what I should do. When Harry and Stephen walked into my office, an important part of the answer was that we realized that we had very similar visions and goals for this project. To me, this seemed like a great opportunity because the idea of Arbitrum was perfectly fine for a successful academic project, but it could also be turned into a successful business project, it just took some time.

Founding members of Arbitrum (from left to right): Ed Felten, Steven Goldfeder, Harry Kalodner, image source from the Internet

BlockBeats: How have the roles of the three founders changed since they started building Arbitrum to founding Offchain Labs?

Ed: In the early days, there were just the three of us, and we would make progress by discussing ideas, and we didn’t have a clear delineation of different roles between each other. Each of us is just doing development in earnest because we’re a small team and everybody is trying to find ways to move things forward. We have a single codebase and everyone is working on it. And we often meet together to review the progress of the work. Everyone is thinking about every question or making an open suggestion, and this has been going on almost all the time.

In 2018, we started the company and started to grow in size, so there was more detail and our roles were more different. Now, each of us has a unique role to play, and although we still have a lot of things to discuss together and a lot of important decisions to make together, it’s now more specialized. In his role as CEO, Stephen is very much the public face of the company, and he has a very broad focus on everything we do. Harry is the CTO, so he’s more focused on making sure that we build and deliver the technology that we need. And in my role as Chief Scientist in research, I’m thinking about what Arbitrum needs to develop so that we can continue to make progress. So I’m thinking more about what difficulties we’re going to encounter six months or a year from now, what to prepare for and develop, and what are the core technical challenges that we need to solve.

BlockBeats: This brings me to the question I’ve been asking all along, why did you choose Ethereum as your base layer?

Ed: I think there are a couple of reasons for this. Some are where Ethereum was and is where developers are, but ultimately the Ethereum community. Ethereum’s openness and the community that it has built is very valuable to us, so we want to go to Ethereum’s community, not only because the value of that community and the value of connecting it is huge, but Ethereum has managed to build the kind of community that we want to build around Arbitrum. Therefore, in our opinion, building on it is a right choice. Arbitrum is a layer 2 technology, and it needs a layer 1. We decided early on that we wanted to adopt Ethereum all as our first layer. For the reasons I’ve described, I think this has proven to be a very wise decision. We remain very excited to be exclusive to Ethereum.

Ethereum Foundation, OP, and zkEVM

As mentioned at the beginning of the article, Arbitrum is actually in a relatively awkward situation when it chooses the Optimistic technical path, dealing with the competitive pressure of the OP team on the one hand, and the path questioning of ZK’s narrative on the other. But the team’s choice of Optimistic seems to be extraordinarily firm, as it was at the beginning of Offchain’s establishment, and in 2023, when the ZK track is collectively making efforts. Where does Ed’s confidence in the Optimistic Rollup come from, and what does he think about the upcoming ZK circuit?

BlockBeats: Offchain Labs was officially founded in 2018, when Ethereum’s “scaling prince” Optimism team had already emerged and seemed to have a closer relationship with the Ethereum Foundation. How does Arbitrum at this time see the competition between himself and the Optimism team?

Ed: I think in the early days, a lot of people in the Ethereum space assumed that Optimism would win the race in the Layer 2 space, and if not by default, at least considered them a dark horse in the space. But we felt that we had the technology and the team to effectively solve the scaling problem, so I believed in what we were doing at Arbitrum from the beginning and believed that it would bring a lot of value. From now on, I think this has been proven.

Personally, I believe that Ethereum is unhealthy if it has only one single Layer2, and that having a diverse Layer2 is valuable for Ethereum. In my opinion, the Ethereum Foundation sees it this way, and the Foundation is working hard to promote the development of the Ethereum ecosystem in this direction. This is something that I really like and appreciate about Ethereum, where the Foundation and the community decide the direction of Ethereum through a process of openness and collaboration, which reminds me that the early development of the Internet also had this healthy, open, collaborative, technology-based process to do some things, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force. I think they’ve done a great job of opening up, listening, and incorporating a lot of perspectives, whether it’s people from different approaches to technology, people from different countries, people from different companies, people with different types of interests and perspectives. In conclusion, I take this very seriously, and I really appreciate and appreciate the efforts of the Ethereum community and leadership to move this process forward.

BlockBeats: What support has the Ethereum Foundation given to Arbitrum during its development?

Ed: I think the Foundation and Vitalik have always been open to communication, and when we advocate something, they give us a fair “hearing.” In terms of financial support, the Foundation has always tried to remain neutral and will not provide financial support to different Layer2 teams. But in terms of being an honest broker, consulting with us, talking to us, working with us, trying to move things forward, I think they’re doing a great job.

Arbitrum has a good relationship with the Ethereum Foundation, as well as their leadership, which has evolved over time. Overall, I think the Ethereum Foundation has done a great job of building a strong Layer 2 ecosystem. We certainly value the Ethereum Foundation and what they do, and we see ourselves as part of the Ethereum community, and when Ethereum succeeds, we will succeed too.

Offchain Labs and the broader Arbitrum community have been striving to be “good citizens” of the Ethereum community. We brought the Prism team, a leading client that helps Ethereum build consensus, into the company, partly to contribute and help the Ethereum ecosystem, but also because we believe it is valuable to understand what is happening at the Ethereum level, and the discussions and communications that are taking place here.

BlockBeats: Would you still consider Optimistic Rollup to be a more desirable technology path in the Layer 2 space?

Ed: Absolutely, I think Optimistic Rollup is still the best option, and if the Arbitrum team were to redo Layer 2 from now on, I would still choose this technical path. Optimistic Rollup actually has a number of advantages over other alternatives, such as ZK Rollup, the biggest advantage is simplicity and lower cost. It’s no coincidence that Optimistic Rollup went live much earlier than ZK Rollup on mainnet, as Optimistic Rollup is simpler and more flexible, and we are able to innovate in many other areas of practical importance that bring a lot of value to our users.

A particularly good example of this is data compression. The biggest cost of a rollup is publishing call data on the Ethereum mainnet, so it’s important to compress the data as efficiently as possible to keep costs down. In the Optimistic Rollup proof system, we can choose almost any compression method we want, which means we can achieve better compression at a lower cost. If we switch the Optimistic Rollup proof system in Arbitrum to a zero-knowledge fraud proof system today, users won’t notice any difference other than that the fees will be slightly higher.

BlockBeats: You said in an interview that zero-knowledge fraud proofs are “the solution of the future” and always will be. Do you still hold this point of view now?

Ed: I think I’m right, but I’d like to be a little cautious on this issue, and I’m referring to the idea of using an EVM solution with zero-knowledge proof of fraud as the only proof of fraud mechanism. Zero-knowledge proofs are indeed very valuable as an integral part of the overall protocol, such as EIP-4844, a new type of data availability system that Ethereum is promoting. This data availability system relies on the KZG promise, which includes a zero-knowledge proof-type proof system. So I think it makes sense to use zero-knowledge proofs as a tool in the protocol locally, but if you want to use the idea of zero-knowledge proofs for the entire Rollup protocol from start to finish, it doesn’t have much advantage in practice, and it does increase the cost.

BlockBeats: But this year, many ZK Rollup projects have gone live on the mainnet, and the zkEVM track is also very hot and competitive. Is there an advantage to Optimistic Rollup proofs now compared to the zero-knowledge proof technology path?

Ed: First of all, I think the competition in this space is healthy, which is good for users. We welcome the competition and believe that we have the best solution, and we believe that users will continue to choose Arbitrum, but we have to prove it every day, and by constantly providing better services, I believe we can do it.

In fact, one of the huge advantages of zkEVM starting to be truly user-oriented for Arbitrum is that users can now make a real and fair comparison between the services we provide and those provided by the ZK system, rather than comparing the actual performance of Arbitrum with the expected performance of the ZK system. I think that Optimistic Rollup has a very clear advantage in areas such as data compression, and not only can users see that Arbitrum has lower fees than ZK, but these fees are more than enough to cover the cost of operating the network. Obviously, this means that users can get better economic benefits in the long run.

**BlockBeats: However, during the time of claiming the ARB airdrop, the Arbitrum network also seemed to be congested, causing many people to question the performance of the network. **

Ed: Yes, just like Ethereum, Arbitrum has a certain capacity, and if the demand exceeds that capacity, then the gas fees will go up. But the congestion that occurs on the ARB claim day is not actually the congestion of the Arbitrum network itself, but the congestion of the airdrop website, which is just an old-fashioned website congestion problem. On the day of the ARB airdrop, the number of visits to the website servers reached an unprecedented level, and as a result, the web infrastructure became congested, but the Arbitrum network itself performed well.

In fact, not only the ARB airdrop collection website, but also other website servers, such as block explorers, also have website congestion. The day you claim your token is the worst congestion experienced by many web servers, including those related to Arbitrum, and you can ask the person running the block explorer or other web server what day the server is busiest and they will tell you that it is the day of the Arbitrum airdrop. It must be admitted that this situation is unfortunate. We’ve tested the infrastructure against the expected level of traffic, but in reality, the traffic that day was even much higher than we predicted.

“DAO Fundgate” and Stylus’ new narrative

In April this year, the Arbitrum Foundation was accused of transferring nearly $1 billion in ARB Token to the Foundation’s wallet address before the adoption of the community governance proposal AIP-1, triggering a violent reaction from the community, and remarks such as “DAO is a joke” and “Web3 is not decentralized at all” quickly spread on social media. However, the “DAO funding gate” doesn’t seem to have had much of an impact on Arbitrum’s progress, and two months ago, the team launched a new product, Stylus, after Nitro, and gave it a new narrative.

BlockBeats: There’s also been a lot of discussion about the Arbitrum team seemingly transferring the token before the DAO governance vote passed. Ed, can you elaborate on what happened?**

Ed: There was actually some misunderstanding in this matter, and there was poor communication with the community at the time of the token launch, which was an issue with the Arbitrum team. But I want to clarify that these tokens are not transferred, and there are no transactions that transfer these tokens anywhere. The 750 million ARB tokens (about $1 billion) that people are complaining about were to be allocated to the Arbitrum Foundation at the beginning of the Genesis event. We have set up multiple accounts for the airdrop, a team account, an investor account, an Arbitrum Foundation account, an individual airdrop account, and a DAO airdrop and DAO treasury account. And the $750 million in tokens allocated to the Arbitrum Foundation at the Genesis campaign has been in the Foundation’s account since the beginning.

The reason for the misunderstanding is that there is a token distribution chart in the Genesis announcement on the Arbitrum official website, which has a section called Arbitrum DAO, which includes the token quota of the DAO treasury and the token quota of the foundation. However, this chart does not distinguish between the 750 million tokens of the Arbitrum Foundation and the 360 million tokens of the Arbitrum DAO treasury, leading the community to believe that the tokens in the Arbitrum Foundation address were transferred, but in fact these tokens were not transferred. To be fair, if the Token was actually transferred, then the DAO community was justified in its displeasure, but they didn’t. The people were not happy and therefore voted against the original AIP-1.

BlockBeats: Why did a governance vote be held to “pass” this decision when the initial allocation had already been given to the Foundation?

Ed: Regarding the initial vote on AIP-1, it has to be admitted that this is another mistake the team made, which is that it is not good to have the community vote to approve of something that has happened, or to say that it is good for the community to agree to something that has already happened.

Even in Web3, some things need to happen in a centralized way initially. For example, if there is no initial distribution of tokens or a foundation as a legal entity, there will be no community airdrops. And in order for a foundation to be a legal entity, it needs to have a board of directors, a charter, and all those things, just like any legal organization needs to have a structure. But the team believes that it would be good to have the DAO community approve these necessary and already happening things, as these decisions are all fine.

But of course, the community was later outraged by the “750 million Token Incident” and voted down the proposal. That’s when the Arbitrum Foundation realized that it was better to start all over again, and to do better. That’s why there will be AIP-1.1 and AIP-1.2, this is the team’s second attempt, and it’s also done well, 98% yes if I’m not mistaken. At present, the code writing of these on-chain operation proposals has been completed and passed the security audit.

In conclusion, my view is that the actions taken by the team are reasonable and fair, but due to poor communication, the DAO community expects different from the actual situation. But on the other hand, it’s a very good reflection of the fact that the DAO does have control. If anyone thinks that the Arbitrum Foundation is just doing what it wants and the DAO’s opinion doesn’t matter, I believe this has shown them that the DAO has de facto control. I hope that once AIP-1.1 and 1.2 pass the DAO’s on-chain vote, it will be a clear indication that the Foundation is moving forward as the DAO wishes, and that the Foundation is indeed accountable to the DAO.

BlockBeats: The DAO Fundgate has had a big impact on the Arbitrum community, but after AIP-1.1 and 1.2, things are gradually getting better. We’ve also noticed that Arbitrum hasn’t stalled as a result of this incident, and that the team has recently been working a new product, Stylus, can Ed shed some light on Stylus’ narrative?

Ed: Stylus is a new feature that we’re currently in development and we’re very excited about. This is an “EVM+” approach, which means that Arbitrum will continue to be compatible with Ethereum, and anything that runs on Ethereum should run on Arbitrum.

What Stylus brings to the table is the ability to write smart contracts in any programming language. Stylus will compile it into WebAssembly, which you can then run as a smart contract on the Arbitrum chain. You can call it just like an EVM contract, and in fact, the person interacting with the Stylus contract doesn’t even need to know that it’s a Stylus contract. Despite being written in different languages, the contract will interact seamlessly with the EVM chain.

So what are the advantages of this? There are two main advantages. One is to let developers write smart contracts in any programming language they like, which makes it possible for more programmers to enter the realm of Layer 2 programming or blockchain programming. Those who want to write in Rust, C++, or any other language with a standard compiler toolchain can now write smart contracts and run them on the Arbitrum chain as true smart contracts. This in itself is exciting.

Another exciting thing is that since the core of the Nitro stack is this WebAssembly execution engine, the Stylus contract should run more efficiently than the EVM contract. We’ve done a lot of work to speed up the execution of EVM contracts, but the Stylus contract will be another huge improvement, meaning you can do the same calculations with less gas, or more with the same gas.

BlockBeats: Will Stylus be a standalone new chain?**

Ed: Stylus is not a new standalone chain, it is something for developers to use and users can interact with the Stylus chain. It’s a single chain. Everything works together seamlessly, and that’s called “EVM+”.

We’re working hard to get Stylus ready, and when it has some experience on the testnet and undergoes a full security review, Stylus will be offered to the Arbitrum DAO, which has the option to deploy it on the mainnet Arbitrum One. This is the DAO’s decision, and I am sure the DAO will support it. Of course, anyone else who uses Arbitrum Orbit to launch an L3 chain, this technology will also be open to them.

BlockBeats: In your opinion, will “EVM+” or “enhanced EVM” become the new mainstream narrative for Ethereum scaling in the future?

Ed: I hope so, I think it’s the right way to do it. EVM brings a lot of benefits. The EVM model provides a secure and consistent way for contracts to interact with each other, so the idea of EVM as an international language for different types of contracts to communicate with each other is important. I think EVM will be the standard for this, but I also think there’s a lot of room for innovation in creating new smart contracts and creating Layer 3s.

We want to open up all of these innovations, but by increasing rather than decreasing EVM. That’s why we call it “EVM+”, because we think it’s about adding functionality to the EVM, rather than cutting the benefits of the EVM. For me, this approach makes a lot of sense as a way to continue to evolve the technology. I would like other eco-bents to take a similar approach, but obviously it’s up to them to go down this path or not.

BlockBeats: Thank you so much for your time, is there anything else Ed would like to add before we wrap up?

Ed: First of all, thank you so much BlockBeats for the interview, it’s important to communicate openly about things between the team and the community. I also want to emphasize how important the Chinese Arbitrum community is to what we do. We know that we have a lot of friends in the Chinese community, there are a lot of users and developers, which is very important to us, and we are very grateful for all that you have done, and we hope to build a deeper and more meaningful relationship with the Chinese community in the future.