Ethereum Rollup ‘Arbitrum’ Releases Update to Reduce Gas Fees by 50%

Arbitrum, Ethereum’s largest rollup solution with over US$2 billion total value locked (TVL), has announced the launch of Nitro, a major update that reduces gas fees by half on Arbitrum’s network.

According to an official announcement from Offchain Labs – the company behind the rollup – Nitro is an advanced rollup stack that can do Arbitrum’s interactive fraud proofs over WASM (WebAssembly), an experimental low-level programming language:

The Arbitrum Nitro upgrade was under development in October 2021 by the Offchain Labs team. In essence, Nitro is a fully built-out scaling infrastructure that uses WASM instead of today’s custom-designed language and compilers.

Arbitrum is 90-95 percent cheaper and faster than Ethereum (gas fees on the rollup are usually around US$0.50 or $1). However, the integration of Nitro will further lower gas fees while increasing the throughput.

Today, we throttle Arbitrum’s capacity, but with Nitro we’ll be able to release those controls and significantly up our throughput. And while Arbitrum today is already 90–95 percent cheaper than Ethereum on average, Nitro cuts our costs even further.

Offchain blog post

Arbitrum Making Waves in DeFi Sector

Arbitrum is Ethereum’s largest optimistic rollup. Rollups are a technology used to scale the Ethereum network by taking the transaction data out of the mainnet to execute it on the rollup-specific blockchain. The transaction result is then bundled up and sent back to Ethereum, so Ethereum node validators can verify whether the data is valid.

Arbitrum has collaborated with a handful of high-performance DeFi protocols – a few months ago Crypto News Australia reported that Tornado Cash had integrated with Arbitrum to allow the Ethereum-based crypto mixer to enjoy Arbitrum’s cheap gas fees and high throughput.

Arbitrum also hosts NFTs (non-fungible tokens). A month ago, Crypto News Australia also reported that roughly US$1.4 million worth of Smol Brains – the most popular NFT collection on Arbitrum – had been stolen in an exploit, as confirmed by Arbitrum’s NFT marketplace TreasureDAO.