Summary

As the interest rate hike of the Federal Reserve slows the pace, a mini-bull market was spotted in the crypto market at the end of January, with Bitcoin rising to a six-month high, surpassing $23,700. Arbitrum has created new momentum to the entire crypto market on top of the unfading favor in Ethereum Layer 2. For one thing, Arbitrum released an update in 2022 to cope with more frequent trading activity； for the other, projects from Arbitrum’s ecosystem have received unprecedented attention due to the Arbitrum Odyssey. This report will focus on development of Arbitrum based on technical upgrades and future possibilities. Meanwhile, from the perspective of the Arbitrum ecosystem, reasons for the success and future development of the burgeoning projects in DeFi and gaming are analyzed and concluded, such as GMX, which demonstrates disruptive power on mechanism that it empowered GMX to outperform others in terms of protocol revenue in the bear market. With the help of the favorable contributors, Arbitrum’s token offering is expected to remain in a positive position.

Overview

The performance of Layer2 is second to none at the beginning of 2023, which is in line with the predictions of most institutions and influencers. In terms of token prices, Optimism, Polygon and token on Arbitrum eco are also superior, for example, the token $OP peaked at $3.17 in February and $MATIC peaked at $1.32. As new L1 chains, such as Solana and Terra, are volatile under the influence of the incidents in bear market, the future will still be dominated by Ethereum; it is arguably that the competition yet to come will be between new L1 chains and Layer2. With a small climax in the crypto market, Arbitrum is the vanguard among others.

Currently, Arbitrum is the project with highest TVL in Ethereum’s Layer 2 scaling solution, reaching $2.98B, accounting for 3.01% of all networks combined, and 49.51% in Layer2. Arbitrum Rollup is an off-chain protocol managed by on-chain Ethereum contracts, to be precise, Arbitrum is not a blockchain but an off-chain transaction uploaded to the main Ethereum network through a compression algorithm. This approach can partially solve the congestion problem faced by Ethereum, in order for creation of advantages on fast transaction, low gas fee, security guarantee and good user experience.

1. Technical upgrade

In 2022, Arbitrum has been active. In addition to the Odyssey event, technical upgrades were frequently announced, including the launch of the Arbitrum Nova, Arbitrum One and the introduction of a new programming environment, Stylus. Core technical features and applicable scenarios will be dissected in below.

(1) Arbitrum Nova — An AnyTrust Chain

On July 12, 2022, Arbitrum Network announced the completion of a new chain, Arbitrum Nova. This chain is built on AnyTrust and designed specifically for gaming, social applications, and more cost-sensitive scenarios. AnyTrust is rooted on the assumption of minimal trust ensured through the Data Availability Committee. This committee will be responsible for managing off-chain transaction data and providing that data to support batches. As a result, AnyTrust eliminates the 7-day withdrawal period that users have to wait and improves the overall user experience. The core technical feature include:

(2) Nitro

On July 12, 2022, Arbitrum Network announced the completion of a new chain, Arbitrum Nova. This chain is built on AnyTrust and designed specifically for gaming, social applications and more cost-sensitive scenarios. AnyTrust is rooted on the assumption of minimal trust ensured through the Data Availability Committee. This committee will be resp

At the end of August 2022, Arbitrum One was successfully upgraded to the Nitro version, which significantly improves network speed and reduces transaction costs. In general, the following technical upgrades have been made to Nitro:

The core of the Arbitrum Nitro technology is a new prover that enables interactive fraud proofs of Arbitrum on WASM code, which is constructable and programmable by standard languages and tools. Also, Gethcore is compiled directly into Arbitrum to be more compatible with EVM.

(3) Stylus

Offchain Labs, the official Arbitrum development team, has announced the launch of Stylus, a next-generation programming environment for Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova. Stylus empowers users to deploy applications with their favorite programming languages (including Rust, C and C++) through WebAssembly smart contract functionality so that EVM programs on Arbitrum can run simultaneously. Stylus is exponentially faster with lower cost and fully interoperable with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Although Offchain Labs calls Stylus EVM+, Stylus will not replace EVM.

2. Collaborations across the ecosystem

In the past year, the market share of Arbitrum has grown significantly, and this growth comes from: 1. continued bullishness of Layer2; 2. the expected token offering of Arb; and 3. the growth of applications in the eco, especially native applications. Since the mainnet Arbitrum One went live last September, applications such as Uniswap, Sushiswap and Curve, the leading DeFi protocols on the Ethereum Layer1 mainnet, have been integrated and deployed on Arbitrum One, as well as some well-known cross-chain protocols. The influx of these applications also demonstrates that developers are bullish on the Arbitrum scaling solution.

In June 2022, organizers of the Odyssey event selected the 14 most active projects on Arbitrum, including Cross-Chain Bridge, DeFi, NFT, and Games. The duration of the event was originally planned to be 8 weeks, but was suspended after the first week. The primary cause of the suspension was network congestion in the second week, which resulted in soaring gas fee. At that time, the gas fee has exceeded that on mainnet Ethereum. In fact, it has fully explained that Arbitrum was incompetent for such user capacity in its state at that time.

Although the Odyssey was only held for a week, the event still attracted considerable attention. Arbitrum, combined with NFT, in the form of an event week inspired users to participate and fostered the learning curve of users on Arbitrum’s ecology; not only the overall user base is enriched, but also traffic is injected into the ecosystem. At the same time, it is a smart move that expectation of future token offerings is preserved rather than the hasty way of giving out tokens as airdrops.

According data from browsers, 207K addresses were added on Arbitrum from the beginning of the Odyssey on June 21 to the end of the first week. On June 27th, the number of daily new addresses hit the record of 55K, which further proves the success of the Odyssey.

After the Odyssey event, Arbitrum has extended its technical efforts and launched projects with innovative mechanisms in the eco, elevating the degree of expectation for a mini-bull at the end of January to full. Currently, Arbitrum’s average monthly active address count for October 2022-January 2023 is 608,365, an increase of 51.2% from September. A corresponding rise in Arbitrum’s transaction volume and user base are also in presence.

3. Analysis of trending projects

In the past 2 months, native ecological projects on Arbitrum have been the center of the whole crypto market. Some projects are sorted out in below that the market cap on each of these projects is lower compared with projects in the same category on other L1 chains, which implies that these projects may be undervalued. Along with the token offering and future development of Arbitrum, there will be plenty of room for improvement.

3.1 DeFi

There are already well-known projects deployed on Arbitrum with multi-chain deployments, such as Uniswap and AAVE, but instead, Arbitrum’s native projects have exhibited stunning momentum, such as the perpetual contract exchange GMX, revenue aggregators for derivatives and the vault Jones DAO. Arbitrum has found the holy grail for sustaining a lucrative model: derivative protocols are similar to casinos with ongoing business revenue; various types of revenue aggregators adopt tactics to lure more capital inflow and expand the revenue streaming; therefore, as more people jump into revenue aggregators, more liquidity is available, thus creating more revenue.

（1）Trending Project 1: GMX

GMX is a decentralized perpetual contracts exchange. Users are provided with options to trade ETH, BTC, LINK and UNI perpetual contracts with up to 30x leverage on a decentralized platform rather than shoring or longing with leverage on centralized exchange, such as Binance or FTX.

In terms of execution, it is more complex than that on centralized exchanges, and price feeding is needed by oracles. Therefore, external forces will engage to perform opening and closing; Keeper (similar to crowdsourcing) serves as the external force to help GMX with these functions.

When a user performs a close action on GMX, it is divided into two parts: one is to send a transaction, and the other to execute, which is done by GMX Keeper.

In addition to the Gas fee for sending the transaction, the sender is required to pay a Gas fee to Keeper for executing it.

TVL of GMX has accumulated to $543 million, representing 31.46% of the TVL of all DeFi protocols on Arbitrum. The protocol generated $33.9 million in revenue over the past year, making GMX tokens one of the best assets in the volatile 2022, returning 84.0% in USD and 428.5% in ETH.

（2）Trending Project 1: Camelot

Camelot, as Arbitrum’s native DEX, has completed token sales in December 2022, which is a regular Uniswap V2 + Curve type of DEX overall but with more features available, such as adding Launchpad, incorporating custom transaction fees, combining LP with NFT, and allowing project parties to set incentives. A brief conclusion of the features is as the following:

The project with highest TVL on OP is Velodrome, with $77.14 million in liquidity. This figure even surpasses Uniswap V3, which is currently at $44.87 million, but with an FDV of only $9.46 million and an FDV/TVL of 0.21. Relative to Camelot, Velodrome has a higher TVL, but a lower valuation.

（3）Trending Project 3: RDNT

RDNT, a lending protocol on Arbitrum, has two major innovations: multi-chain lending with LayerZero and revolve lending (unavailable for now). It is currently the leader of the kind on Arbitrum, with higher TVL than the Arb version of AAVE V3, but the competition in the long run will still be intense.

Since it is an all-chain lending protocol, users can deposit any major asset on any major chain and borrow various assets with different underlying assets across chains. Here is how it works: the lender deposits the assets, then the borrower can choose to borrow; 50% of the fees (platform revenue) goes to the lender, and the remaining 50% will be in the form of RNDT as a reward, but locked. The protocol is currently in v1, while v2 will make the following upgrades:

3.2 Gaming

Arbitrum has a booming GameFi ecosystem, especially prominent on three trending projects: Treasure DAO, The Beacon, and Trident DAO. The GameFi eco on Arbitrum does not have the absolute advantage as the derivative sector compared to other chains, on the contrary, it is merely a temporary comparative advantage; the future development depends on the performance in the next.

（1）Treasure DAO

Treasure desires to build a “decentralized Nintendo,” a series of on-chain games that are interconnected through the interoperability of in-game assets and Treasure’s native token, MAGIC, as a shared currency. Some of the most popular games include the strategy game Bridgeworld, The Beacon and Smolverse, as well as the resource management and strategy game Realm.

These games can be accessed through Trove, which is the hub of the Treasure ecosystem, and the marketplace for in-game assets and treasure NFT collectibles. The most popular collections are Smol Brains (the basis of the Smolverse) and The Lost Donkeys, which is also the name of the game.

（2）Trident DAO

Arbitrum’s latest project, Trident, proposed a sustainable GameFi economic model of “Risk to Earn”, which stimulated the interest of players and communities, and became the most sought-after project in the Arbitrum eco after its public offering of tokens.

PSI is Trident’s official utility token that can be used to purchase items, redeem NFTs, and place bet between players, etc. Trident will charge a fee for each successful bet and then destroy it permanently; once the integration of Risk to Earn is completed, the supply of PSI will see deflation.

4. Future Development

The success of Arbitrum bodes well for Layer2 to be the starting point of the next bull market. But before that, technical challenges remain in both Optimistic Rollup and zk Rollup. In the future, Arbitrum will see major developments from 3 perspectives: (1) continuous technical upgrades; (2) continuous support to ecological projects; and (3) attracting users utilizing their expectations on token offering.

First of all, Optimistic Rollup is still criticized by semi-centralized sequencers. Arbitrum currently has centralized sequencers and whitelist proof verification, along with scalable contracts. While these do not pose threats on security at the moment, and competent in protecting user assets, the risk of censorship and loss of user funds remain rising concerns. As a result, decentralized sequencers and proof verification without permission are the ultimate solutions. Offchain Labs has also provided the appropriate technical routes addressing these issues:

In terms of the eco, Defi, cross-chain bridging and gaming categories are Arbitrum’s signature applications. However, in the future, as the developer community and user base continue to pop up, more new applications will be deployed on the platform, and the most anticipated are projects in the social and NFT categories. In the meantime, provided that the success of Treasure and the growth potential of Arbitrum Nova, Arbitrum is destined to find its favorable position in gaming.

In terms of the tokenomics, it cannot be more anticipated, as the token offering is critical to the long-term success of Arbitrum, including (1) the token distribution plan, (2) the airdrop and incentive plan, and (3) the rule of governance. A good economic model will lead Arbitrum to a more positive direction, which is appealing to developers and users. Token distribution is also crucial in determining the governance of L2 and the long-term concentration of power within the ecosystem. In addition, tokens can also be applied to decentralize key network functions, such as sequencers — the entities that sort, bulk-process, and submit transactions to L1.

From the above analysis, it is eminent that 2023 will be a year of continued booming era for Arbitrum: The Odyssey event may be extended; current DeFi and gaming will be strengthened, as well as distinctive native applications in social and NFT sector are expected to emerge. At the same time, the anticipated tokens will be in place to reward users and protocols, and Nova will see practical initiation and protocol deployment.

References

1. https://candydao.notion.site/Arbitrum-Odyssey-17634b06aa084a3a8407d212927e5f16

2. https://www.bitance.net/category/jingzhengbizixun/18081.html

3.https://mirror.xyz/0xB10DF4c0D1C767b3cEdd911a30E78d2bfdFb5888/prNC3wNLuAUi2imlVFuibvxc151x8cT3kTdWOtkFhXM

4. https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/arbitrum-is-mooning

5. Optimism Bedrock vs Arbitrum Nitro — PANews (panewslab.com)

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