The project is designed to provide an easy-to-use platform developers can use to launch highly efficient and scalable Ethereum-compatible smart contracts.
But it’s not the first platform looking to overcome Ethereum’s limitations, there are at least a dozen other solutions looking to offer similar functionality. So what separates Arbitrum from the rest? Well, it has several distinguishing features, including:
High EVM compatibility
Arbitrum is considered to be one of the most EVM-compatible rollups. It’s compatible with the EVM at the bytecode level, and any language that can compile to EVM works out of the box — such as Solidity and Vyper.
This makes it easy to develop on, since developers do not need to get to grips with a new language before building on Arbitrum.
Robust developer tooling
The team behind Arbitrum are doing what they can to minimize barriers to entry when it comes to building on their layer 2 solution. As such, they have produced comprehensive developer documentation for Arbitrum, and the developers can get started using existing tooling for Ethereum. There is no need to download anything specific to Arbitrum, such as plugins, or compilers like Hardhat or Truffle.
Low fees
As a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum, Arbitrum isn’t just designed to boost Ethereum’s transactional throughput, it also minimizes transaction fees at the same time.
Thanks to its extremely efficient rollup technology, Arbitrum is able to cut fees down to just a tiny fraction of what they are on Ethereum, while still providing sufficient incentives for validators.
Fairly launched
Arbitrum has run several testnets since October and is currently live on mainnet for developers. Unlike many other layer 2 scaling solutions, Arbitrum doesn't have its own native utility token — hence there was no token sale.
Moreover, all interested developers will have time to get up and running before Arbitrum opens to the masses, with Arbitrum recently pledging to give all 250+ development teams that applied to build on the developer mainnet at least two full weeks of development time before opening Arbitrum One to everyone.
Well-developed ecosystem
Arbitrum is already working with a wide variety of Ethereum DApps and infrastructure projects, including the likes of Uniswap, DODO, Sushi and dozens of others.
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