Offchain Labs’ New Chain (Arbitrum Nova) Goes Live on Mainnet and Opens for Developers
- The plan is for developers to deploy NFT and decentralized finance (DeFi) projects on the Arbitrum mainnet. However, Arbitrum Nova is primarily built for gaming and social applications.
Offchain Labs has announced the launch of its new chain dubbed Arbitrum Nova. Offchain Labs is the company that owns Arbitrum (an Ethereum scaling project). The announcement states that Offchain Labs used the AnyTrust technology to build the Arbitrum Nova.
Now, the Nova is available on its mainnet, and developers can start deploying their apps on it. Arbitrum creates full Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) environments through the Optimistic rollup technology. Thus, users can have a faster experience on the Ethereum mainnet with little cost.
DefiLlama data values Arbitrum at about $2.5 billion. The protocol is the largest rollup provider on Ethereum. Following the launch of the Arbitrum Nova, there are two Arbitrum chains with a live mainnet. Their combination enables the deployment of various use cases on the blockchain.
The Arbitrum mainnet (Arbitrum one) will remain available for DeFi and NFT projects. However, the primary purpose of creating Nova is for the deployment of gaming and social applications. Offchain Labs built the Nova with its new technology (the Arbitrum AnyTrust technology).
The reason is that this new technology comes with lower fees, greater speed of transactions, and security issues. Offchain Labs claims that its AnyTrust chains are a better-centralized option than the optimistic rollup.
Moving Nova Forward
Offchain Labs further announced that the Nova platform is open for developers. Once they apply for access and are approved, they can deploy their applications.
However, the broader user base would need to wait for the next 14 days before they can access the chain. The Offchain Labs team explained that it would use this period to onboard developers onto the Nova platform.
Once it onboards developers, the Nova will become available to the public. Then, there will be no onboarding of new projects for some time. Thus, Offchain Labs can allow enough time for the public to test Nova’s stability.
According to the announcement, Nova will be available to end-users in the next couple of weeks. The Nova team will provide updates regarding when more users can access Nova by this month-end.
The Offchain Labs team adds that it plans to keep developing more valuable products and features to make Ethereum accessible to everyone.
Comparing Rollups and AnyTrust
Transaction costs and the level of centralization are the main differences between rollups and AnyTrust. AnyTrust chains will have custom security assumptions, and transaction costs are less.
By comparison, rollups inherit security from layer-1 chains. Projects developed on AnyTrust technology can be used to deploy hugely expensive applications.
Also, such applications can have high volume transactions without any issue. GameFi projects are an important example of such applications. These projects are blockchain-built games with rewards for their players. They are also called play-to-earn games.
Rebecca is a Senior Staff Writer at BitcoinWisdom, working hard to bring you the latest breaking news in the cryptocurrency market. In the words of Elon Musk “Buy stock in several companies that make products & services that *you* believe in. Only sell if you think their products & services are trending worse. Don’t panic when the market does. This will serve you well in the long-term.”
