Viewpoint: Arbitrum leads the way into the Layer3 era, Orbit’s innovation and risks

Arbitrum pioneers Layer3, while Orbit innovates with risks.

Just as Polygon and BNB Chain were charging into L2, Arbitrum stumbled and brought everyone into the layer 3 era with Arbitum Orbit.

Offchain Labs quietly released Arbitum Orbit, allowing developers to customize and develop their own L3 chains based on the Arbitrum Nitro Stack.

Is this move by Arbitrum too early? What is the difference between this and the Optimism Stack? What impact will it have on the ecosystem? Let’s discuss it while enjoying the Dragon Boat Festival.

Arbitum Orbit is a scalability solution based on Arbitum Rollup for settlement layer. Developers can build exclusive application chains based on existing Arbitum L2 chains (One, Nova, and test Goerli), which have a high degree of autonomy in consensus mechanisms, governance models, gas fee coin selection, economic models, etc. They can build specific application chains or open ecological chains, highly customized, and giving developers more flexibility and autonomy.

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After researching, there is always a feeling that the bottom-layer infrastructural revolution is too fast, and the upper-layer application ecology cannot keep up. The OP Stack adopts a modular architecture, which is highly open-source and allows third-party L1 chains to copy their fast channels into L2, and they all end up in the Optimism Superchain ecosystem. The Arbitum Stack allows developers to extend customized exclusive application chains based on the security foundation of its L1 and L2. Essentially, they are all trying to constrain the ecological strategic advantages.

The competition between chains ultimately boils down to the competition for developer resources. The most efficient way to achieve this goal is through open solutions and standardized tools. The OP Stack promotes L1 upgrading to L2 in a more gradual and reasonable way, while Arbitum Orbit personally feels too advanced:

1) Allowing developers to design their own gas fee token mechanism gives some “short, flat, and fast” projects the legitimacy to issue tokens;

2) It destroys the natural advantages of the combination between large ecological applications.

Overall, Arbitrum Orbit is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it gives some top applications in the Game and Social fields the possibility to soar to new heights, and on the other hand, due to the technological innovation being ahead of application development, it is inevitable that some short-term troublemakers will take advantage of it. In comparison, I prefer the iterative development blocking pattern of Uniswap being driven step by step by the market and applications. When technology is divorced from actual market demand, it also breeds a kind of original sin.

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