Arbitrum leading decentralised finance adoption

Arbitrum is the largest and most successful optimistic rollup built on Ethereum, the first mainstream layer two (L2) to be running a fraud proof scheme on mainnet (stage 1 L2 milestone) has seen rapid developer adoption from its launch open to permissionless public deployment. To date, Arbitrum remains the only stage 1 general purpose L2, and is soon to be entering stage 2 with the implementation of permissionless validation, currently live on testnet, which will see Arbitrum become the first and only proficiently decentralised general purpose layer 2 network on Ethereum. In conjunction with efforts at the forefront of L2 security and validation decentralisation, Arbitrum is also soon to be releasing their Stylus upgrade, which will allow developers to write smart contracts in languages other than Solidity without losing EVM compatibility, opening up smart contract development to a broader range of developers and use cases.

Given Arbitrum’s best-in-class level of security guarantees, it has been able to amass the highest total value locked (TVL) across the broader L2 ecosystem, currently holding 40% of the TVL across L2s. A slightly more granular breakdown of TVL reveals that Arbitrum holds the most bridged ETH by a substantial margin, and outflows from Ethereum mainnet into the L2 ecosystem continue to preference Arbitrum over other L2s. Further, it doesn’t just seem to be TVL that Arbitrum is dominating, as user growth is continuing to accelerate, and breaking active address records. Daily active users on Arbitrum have even begun to surpass those of the popular memecoin trading blockchain Solana. Arbitrum appears to be ready to push for the mass onboarding of general users to the ecosystem, and towards this end they’ve established a partnership with Robinhood, the popular investing application, to facilitate direct on-chain swaps via the Robinhood Wallet.

In addition the core Arbitrum team has begun supporting Boop, a community run marketing campaign for Arbitrum that seeks to become a rallying ground for retail adoption and subsequent education about the DeFi possibilities on Arbitrum. Weekly updates on the Arbitrum ecosystem are starting to incorporate and run with the fun-loving community initiative. The deep-thinking innovators at Stryke, a premier decentralised options platform on Arbitrum which has developed an ingenious solution to dramatically improve the profitability of liquidity provision (LPs) on automatic market makers (AMMs, eg Uniswap) are joining in on the initiative and offering DeFi options functionality on Boop. It appears Orange finance, an automated liquidity management protocol built on Stryke, are soon to be joining in on the initiative as well and begin offering automatically managed LP vaults for Stryke on the Boop pair.

Notably, Blackrock have begun to quietly participate in Arbitrum governance discussion toward their mission to tokenise assets, further validating the success of Arbitrum and ecosystem development to date. All combined this range of facts implies that despite a current dearth of public attention, Arbitrum might just be the most genuinely exciting ecosystem in crypto today, and looks ready to lead the global adoption of decentralised finance.