After the network was down a few hours, the Arbitrum team finally announced that the migration from Arbitrum Virtual Machine to Nitro was completed. Offchain Labs, the developers of Arbitrum, chose to complete the migration on August 31 as a way to celebrate one year since the layer 2 went live to the public.
What is Arbitrum?
Arbitrum is a Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution developed by Offchain Labs, which has the goal to build a decentralized scaling solution with the same security as Ethereum.
Arbitrum started increasing fast in popularity after GMX, a perpetual DEX built on top of it, became popular due to its revenue-sharing model and unique features.
How does the Nitro upgrade impact users?
The goal of this upgrade is to significantly enhance the experience of both developers and users.
The main improvements are:
- Increased throughput
- Advanced calldata compression (which basically lowers the gas fees paid by Arbitrum users)
- Ethereum L1 gas compatibility ( the gas fees on Arbitrum will decrease/increase depending on the gas fees on Ethereum)
And other changes which will be observed only by the developers.
The gas fees went as low as $0.07 for a swap after the Nitro Upgrade was completed. Considering that a swap costed nearly $0.5 before the migration, it is not surprising that many users have started to show their excitement on Crypto Twitter.
What’s next for Arbitrum?
As Steven Goldfeder, the Co-Founder of Offchain Labs, stated in a post on his Twitter account, there is still a lot of room for improvement.
Fun fact, he revealed that the Arbitrum team started working at Nitro only at 8 days after the first public version of the Layer 2 was launched.
The Co-Founder of Offchain Labs also said that “Nitro is amazing, but we’ve already planted several seeds to make Arbitrum even better.“
“One small step for L2, one giant leap for Ethereum,” is the name of the first article published by the Arbitrum team after successfully launching Nitro. And it’s true considering that we still have to wait a few years until Ethereum will be able to support 100,000 transactions per second without insanely-high gas fees.
Ethereum needs to scale fast in order keep the L1 competition. Arbitrum has made it clear that they’re here to fulfill that vision.
