Arbitrum One has the greatest developer adoption of any smart contract chain after Ethereum

Currently, the top post in r/ethereum is someone capturing a momentary gas spike caused by an equally momentary spike in demand for the network, and the rest of the comments is most people complaining about it, while others are shilling alternate smart contract platforms. Kudos to those that are educating everyone, though!

Incredibly, out of 400 comments, I count only 4 mentioning the actual, imminent solution, that has already seen the greatest developer adoption of any smart contract chain other than Ethereum. This must be one of the greatest cases of information asymmetry I've ever seen.

This is Arbitrum One.

Over 400 Ethereum projects have already deployed on Arbitrum One, with heavy hitters like Uniswap, Chainlink, Maker, Aave, USDC, Sushi, etc. etc. It also has broad infrastructure support with Etherscan, MetaMask, Infura, Alchemy, Truffle, Coinbase Wallet etc. While some chains like Polygon PoS and Binance Smart Chain have seen some of these projects deployed – nothing even comes close to the developer adoption Arbitrum One has seen, aside from Ethereum itself. Indeed, we even have massive new players like Reddit adopting Arbitrum, potentially onboarding 400 million users – the greatest adoption story by numbers in the blockchain industry bar none.

Better news still, Arbitrum One is opening to all users, with all of these dApps deployed within the next couple of weeks! Gas fees will be anywhere between 90% to 99% lower than Ethereum, you'll pay all gas in ETH, and you'll the same wallets you currently use with Ethereum. Crucially, Arbitrum inherits its security, decentralizaiton and network effect characteristics directly from Ethereum. This is the first time in our industry's history that a smart contract chain is scaling without severely compromising on security and decentralization. That said, it's very important to note that Arbitrum One is cutting-edge technology, and it'll take some time to mature. The early release has multiple guardrails in place to ensure safety.

Over the coming months, we'll see a vibrant ecosystem of rollups that can do up to 4,500 TPS in aggregate. With the release of data shards, rollups will scale up to 85,000 TPS. From there, scalability will increase as the data sharding network matures and decentralizes, scaling up to potentially 15 million TPS by the end of the decade.

While there will certainly be centralized solutions offering high throughput and low fees, make no mistake, rollups + data shards are the only way the blockchain industry can achieve global scale in a highly secure, trustless, credibly neutral, and decentralized manner.

So why is no one talking about it? I think it's because Arbitrum and other smart contract rollups do not have a token yet and they have been focused on research and engineering. Unlike most crypto projects where it's all about launching a token first, shilling second, and delivering a product last; Arbitrum has opted to deliver a product first, shill second, and then, maybe if required, launch a token last. This puts it at a hefty disadvantage against other smart contract projects which have tokens and thus incentivize the deployment of motivated shill armies.

I'll see you on Arbitrum One in a couple of weeks' time!