Ethereum Arbitrum scaling network prepares for major upgrade on 31 August
The Nitro update will further ameliorate the transaction fee crisis that has plagued the Ethereum network’s growth over the past two years.
Ethereum’s Layer 2 scaling solution, Arbitrum, is set to receive one of its most significant updates on Wednesday, which will increase transaction throughput, drastically reduce transaction fees and simplify communication between Arbitrum and Ethereum chains.
Dubbed the “Nitro” update, Arbitrum reconfirmed the date of the update in a Twitter post on August 29, confirming that the update will go into effect on August 31 at 10:30 AM Eastern time, in addition to an expected two to four hours of network downtime.
Reminder: Arbitrum One upgrades to Nitro on Wednesday, August 31. There will be 2-4 hours of planned network downtime, starting at 10:30 AM ET / GMT-4.
2 days until Nitro arrives!
Arbitrum is an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution that uses Optimistic Rollup technology to batch large batches of transactions off Ethereum’s smart contract blockchain and decentralised applications before sending them to Ethereum.
According to Offchain Labs’ GitHub account, Nitro will represent a “fully integrated Layer 2 optimistic rollup system” that builds on Arbitrum One with newly enhanced fraud proofing, along with updated sequencers, token bridges and calldata compression mechanisms.
Offchain Labs is a blockchain-based company established in 2018 that builds a suite of Ethereum scaling solutions, of which the Arbitrum One network is the most notable one deployed by the firm.
Arbitrum is going to overtake Solana. Arbitrum Nitro is days away. It’s going to bring faster transactions, cheaper rates and a better experience for builders.
Offchain Labs has also updated its ArbOS (Arbitrum Operating System) component, which has now been rewritten in the Go software programming language. The new version will improve cross-chain communication between Arbitrum and Ethereum, as well as batch processing of transactions and data compression, which in turn will minimise costs on Ethereum’s core network.
The paper also claimed that Arbitrum One’s status will “seamlessly migrate” to Nitro, which should, if executed correctly, rule out any possibility of chain splitting.
In an April 2022 paper, Offchain Labs said the Arbitrum Nitro upgrade would be “the most advanced Ethereum scaling stack” and that “Nitro will massively increase network capacity and reduce transaction costs”, stating:
“Today, we limit Arbitrum’s capacity, but with Nitro we will be able to release those controls and significantly increase our throughput. And while Arbitrum is already 90-95% cheaper than Ethereum on average today, Nitro reduces our costs even further.”
According to decentralised finance (DeFi) aggregator DeFi Llama, Arbitrum has USD 936 million in total value locked up (TVL) on the network spread across 111 different protocols, with GMX, Stargate, Curve and Uniswap among the most popular applications.
The biggest cryptocurrency catalysts of 2022 are just days away:
1) @Ethereum merger: 15 September (21 days away).
2) @Arbitrum Nitro: 31 August (7)
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Source: Cointelegraph
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