On January 11th, it was a milestone moment for Bitcoin as the Bitcoin spot ETF finally gained approval after a decade of repeated applications, opening a new door for traditional investors. Ethereum, on the other hand, is considered to be the narrative most likely to rise after this.
Additionally, as Ethereum is about to undergo the Dencun upgrade, EIP-4844, which is at the core of the EIP, will effectively reduce L2 transaction fees and improve performance. As a result, Arbitrum, built on top of Ethereum, has also become a market focus.
Arbitrum’s ecosystem has lived up to expectations, demonstrating vibrant development momentum and tremendous potential. Offchain Labs, the developer of Arbitrum, has also introduced Arbitrum Orbit, which allows the construction of dedicated chains, following the footsteps of OP Stack. Although its adoption may not be as extensive as OP Stack, it is expected to accelerate the multi-chain era based on the Ethereum ecosystem.
According to Steven Goldfeder, Co-founder of Offchain Labs, there are currently over 50 Arbitrum Orbit chains in development, with a prediction of 150 Orbit chains on the mainnet by 2024. Foresight News has listed around 20 Orbit ecosystem projects for readers to explore.
Before exploring the Arbitrum Orbit ecosystem, let’s first review Offchain Labs’ four major product matrices, including Arbitrum One (Rollup), Arbitrum Nova (AnyTrust), Arbitrum Orbit and Stylus. Among them, Arbitrum One is an L2 Optimistic Rollup that allows developers to make minimal or no modifications when migrating smart contracts from Ethereum to L2. There are 275 ecological applications counted by the Arbitrum portal, and 442 ecological applications counted by DefiLlama, with a total TVL of $2.3 billion.
Arbitrum Nova is built on AnyTrust technology and adopts a Data Availability Committee (DAC), which is more suitable for games, social applications and high transaction volume DApps.
Arbitrum Orbit, which this article will introduce to its ecosystem, allows you to build your own private chain without permission. Each Orbit chain can be configured to use Rollup or AnyTrust, with custom settings for throughput, privacy, gas tokens, governance, protocol logic, independent product roadmaps, while benefiting from the same EVM+ compatibility introduced by Stylus, also allowing for use with Solidity , C, C++, and Rust to deploy EVM-compatible smart contracts.
Earlier this month, Arbitrum Orbit added support for custom gas tokens, allowing the Orbit chain to select specific ERC-20 tokens as gas fees. The importance of this functional support is self-evident and will help Orbit Chain to enhance the utility of its own tokens and expand its ecosystem.
According to Foresight News, there are currently 18 projects disclosed that will utilize Arbitrum Orbit to launch the Orbit chain. These projects mainly involve areas such as gaming, derivatives, liquidity, and NFTs. They hope to leverage the advantages of low-cost transactions/interactions, high throughput, customizable gas fees, customizable governance, and flexible security models offered by the Orbit chain.
Additionally, Arbitrum has partnered with Rollup-As-A-Service platforms Caldera, AltLayer, and Conduit to enable developers to launch their own custom Rollups.
Xai is an Arbitrum Orbit L3 game-specific chain (utilizing Anytrust technology) co-developed by Offchain Labs, the team behind Arbitrum, and managed by the Xai Foundation. Xai documents show that Offchain Labs will develop and provide services for the Xai blockchain under the guidance of the Xai Foundation, and will also provide ongoing marketing support for the Xai network and ecosystem.
Tailored specifically for gaming, Xai aims to provide an abstracted wallet and account experience for gamers, higher gas and contract limits for developers, and a fully decentralized ecosystem that promotes trust among all participants and transparency.
The main goal of the Xai Foundation is to foster the development of developers and games within the XAI blockchain ecosystem, attract third-party developers and games to join the platform, and facilitate effective marketing strategies for games deployed on Xai.
Xai has also launched its token, Xai, through the 43rd Binance Launchpad. Xai token serves as the primary token within the game ecosystem and is used for in-game payments for games and virtual items. Ex Populus, a game studio, is the first developer to deploy games on Xai and is currently developing two games, “Final Form” and “LAMOverse”. Xai has already launched its mainnet, and according to the Xai roadmap, the in-chain trading card game “Final Form” will be released in April.
Frame is an Arbitrum Orbit L2 project built for creators and collectors, built using the Arbitrum Nitro technology stack, and will launch mainnet on January 31st.
In December 2023, Frame announced that it had completed a new round of financing, with participation from Electric Capital, 9gag founder Ray Chan, Luca Netz and former Sushiswap CEO 0xMaki.
RARI Chain is an EVM equivalent chain built on Arbitrum and will be decentralized by the RARI holder community and RARI DAO. Rarible will also integrate RARI Chain into the Rarible protocol (NFT marketplace), as well as into Rarible X, a turnkey marketplace solution.
RARI Chain allows users low transaction costs and supports payments via credit card in ETH, USDC or USD. This is achieved through RARI Chain’s integration with Arbitrum Anytrust data availability.
RARI Chain has also partnered with Caldera, Gelato, LayerZero, Magic, Rarible, Thirdweb, and WalletConnect, among others. For example, LayerZero enables developers to create collections that can be seamlessly transferred between chains using the ONFT standard without fragmentation or external risks. The gasless minting on RARI Chain is powered by Gelato, and Thirdweb has introduced Account Abstraction and fiat payments to the chain.
In October 2023, Cometh, a Web3 game and DApp development platform, announced that it would cooperate with AltLayer (Rollup as a Service project) and Arbitrum to deploy Layer3 Rollup “Muster”. Among them, AltLayer will enable developers to launch highly modular application customization Rollups.
Cometh will also launch card game Cosmik Battle on Muster, leveraging Arbitrum Orbit’s massive scalability potential, low cost, and fast confirmation times.
Syndr is an institutional-grade options and futures trading protocol, and its Syndr Chain is an application-specific Layer3 Rollup that will be launched as an Arbitrum Orbit chain and operated in collaboration with Caldera. Currently, the Syndr Chain has been deployed on the Arbitrum Goerli testnet.
Syndr abstracts the underlying architecture to achieve a seamless trading experience. Additionally, Syndr does not charge transaction fees to traders, ensuring that all transactions can be conducted without gas fees or MetaMask pop-ups.
Meliora is an Arbitrum Orbit L3 for creating fixed income/credit based application ecosystems by ensuring fast, cost-effective transaction processing using the Arbitrum Orbit Rollup Stack. Meliora contributor Volatilis is also developing a fixed income and periodic clearing free lending protocol, the CREDIT Protocol.
Meliora uses MELIORA or CREDIT to pay gas fees. According to Meliora’s official website, Meliora’s native token MELIORA aims to build an ecosystem focused on collaboration and economic incentives, which can be specifically reflected in sequencer, Gas, MEV fee sharing, validator staking, governance and Gas tokens.
The CREDIT Protocol previously stated at the end of November 2023 that it would launch the second quarter test network on December 1, allowing users to test and earn retroactive Meliora token airdrop points at the same time. However, no relevant progress was released subsequently.
OurSong is a social music NFT platform. In April 2022, the developer behind it, Our Happy Company, completed a US$7.5 million seed round of financing, led by Infinity Ventures and Animoca Brands, with participation from Cherubic Ventures, Circle Ventures, etc.
Our Happy Company was co-founded by famous musician and producer John Legend, KKBOX founder Chris Lin and Twitch founder Kevin Lin. The company’s flagship product OurSong aims to provide a fairer way to provide digital creation services, monetize their work and build community.
Arbitrum disclosed in October last year that OurSong had joined the Orbit chain ecosystem, but the two parties did not disclose further progress.
Deri Protocol is a decentralized derivatives protocol that has launched Deri V4 on the Arbitrum mainnet with the support of AltLayer in late November 2023. Deri Protocol says that leveraging the Arbitrum Orbit, Deri V4 is expected to enhance Arbitrum’s coverage across various L1 and L2 networks.
Hook Protocol is an NFT derivative DEX that supports both perpetual and options. It has released the Hook Odyssey testnet preview in November. Odyssey is a derivative DEX focused on NFTs, deployed on the custom Arbitrum Orbit Chain.
Superposition is a DeFi native Layer3 built on top of Arbitrum, providing a native, permissionless order book, allowing any developer to take advantage of shared deep liquidity, and also providing a seamless user experience through account abstraction.
Superposition’s roadmap includes Superposition Layer (building an L3 chain on Arbitrum One), Superposition DEX, and cross-chain. Superposition is leveraging Orbit technology to enable dedicated throughput, native account abstraction, and higher performance/lower cost for Stylus.
Rollup-as-a-service protocol AltLayer launched on January 10th Nitrogen, an Arbitrum Orbit public testnet using Celestia as a modular DA, secured with Arbitrum Nitro fraud proofs, and integrated with Celestia Blobstream on Arbitrum Sepolia.
With Nitrogen, L2 transaction data is written to Celestia as blobs rather than published as Ethereum call data. Once the data is attested by the Celestia validator set, the generated DA proof is stored in the Blobstream DA contract on Ethereum, making the calldata cost almost negligible.
AltLayer said that with Celestia, developers can now deploy Orbit chains like smart contracts with minimal setup time or overhead.
Parallel Network is a full-chain Layer2 scaling solution built on Ethereum and powered by Arbitrum Orbit, designed to unify the liquidity of any chain into one place. Parallel Network is powered by Arbitrum’s Nitro stack, Conduit, and cross-chain interoperability protocol Socket.
Parallel Network also provides support for Parallel’s ERC-4337 account abstraction through a partnership with account abstraction infrastructure Pimlico.
The Parallel Network mainnet is open to developers and currently allows users to bridge ETH to Parallel through an early access program. Parallel’s official website has an airdrop section, but no detailed information has been disclosed.
Layer2 network Kinto was originally a KYC-compliant Layer2 network based on OP Stack, designed to connect financial institutions and real-world assets through DeFi. In November last year, Kinto decided to launch as part of the Arbitrum Orbit ecosystem.
Kinto is an L2 Rollup based on Arbitrum Nitro technology. It operates as an Optimistic Rollup parallel to Arbritrum One and Nova, providing KYC, insurance, AML, and fraud monitoring at the blockchain level. All participants undergo KYC verification, and the network continuously runs AML checks on all participants. Only verified participants are able to execute transactions.
The governance and utility token of the Kinto network, KINTO, is allocated 60% to community members, with the majority being distributed to users and developers building on it. 25% is allocated to Pre-Seed and Seed round investors, as well as advisors (with a three-year vesting period), and 15% is allocated to team members (with a three-year vesting period).
According to Kinto documentation, the network will be fully released in February 2024, and Engen (trial release) has been started.
Avive World is a DePin and UBI project on Arbitrum and a token-gated community that launched the Avive testnet on Arbitrum Orbit in partnership with AltLayer.
Avive World uses the Proof of Network (PON) mechanism to encourage users to actively develop social relationships in the Avive ecosystem and reward users for their meaningful participation, contribution and support within the community.
Partners listed on Avive World’s official website include Arbitrum, OKX, AltLayer, Biconomy, Particle Network, etc.
Fiefdom is an Orbit chain powered by Arbitrum Anytrust, designed for gaming and trading in the Metaverse. As a Layer3 network, Fiefdom provides low-latency, low-cost transactions. FIEF token serves as the gas token of the Fiefdom network.
Its Fief Protocol is a multi-chain platform that allows trading of Metaverse assets and earning rewards through the FIEF token, with decentralized fee sharing.
Powered by Arbitrum Nitro, Alpha Dune Network is a loyalty-driven, gaming-focused chain. Caldera will help Alpha Dune launch and manage dedicated rollups for its Web3 gaming applications such as Houndrace and Dune Crown. Alpha Dune will also use Celestia as its primary data availability solution.
Polychain Monsters, a multi-chain NFT collection and gaming ecosystem, previously stated in October last year that it would cooperate with AltLayer to introduce a full-chain monster battle system. Additionally, Polychain Monsters will launch custom chains using Arbitrum Orbit chains.
Sanko GameCorp is an on-chain game studio that plans to release a game console and arcade “Dream Machine” built natively on Arbitrum. Sanko GameCorp plans to launch Orbit chain via Caldera.
https://sankodreammachine.net/
Reference: https://docs.arbitrum.io/launch-orbit-chain/orbit-gentle-introduction
On January 11th, it was a milestone moment for Bitcoin as the Bitcoin spot ETF finally gained approval after a decade of repeated applications, opening a new door for traditional investors. Ethereum, on the other hand, is considered to be the narrative most likely to rise after this.
Additionally, as Ethereum is about to undergo the Dencun upgrade, EIP-4844, which is at the core of the EIP, will effectively reduce L2 transaction fees and improve performance. As a result, Arbitrum, built on top of Ethereum, has also become a market focus.
Arbitrum’s ecosystem has lived up to expectations, demonstrating vibrant development momentum and tremendous potential. Offchain Labs, the developer of Arbitrum, has also introduced Arbitrum Orbit, which allows the construction of dedicated chains, following the footsteps of OP Stack. Although its adoption may not be as extensive as OP Stack, it is expected to accelerate the multi-chain era based on the Ethereum ecosystem.
According to Steven Goldfeder, Co-founder of Offchain Labs, there are currently over 50 Arbitrum Orbit chains in development, with a prediction of 150 Orbit chains on the mainnet by 2024. Foresight News has listed around 20 Orbit ecosystem projects for readers to explore.
Before exploring the Arbitrum Orbit ecosystem, let’s first review Offchain Labs’ four major product matrices, including Arbitrum One (Rollup), Arbitrum Nova (AnyTrust), Arbitrum Orbit and Stylus. Among them, Arbitrum One is an L2 Optimistic Rollup that allows developers to make minimal or no modifications when migrating smart contracts from Ethereum to L2. There are 275 ecological applications counted by the Arbitrum portal, and 442 ecological applications counted by DefiLlama, with a total TVL of $2.3 billion.
Arbitrum Nova is built on AnyTrust technology and adopts a Data Availability Committee (DAC), which is more suitable for games, social applications and high transaction volume DApps.
Arbitrum Orbit, which this article will introduce to its ecosystem, allows you to build your own private chain without permission. Each Orbit chain can be configured to use Rollup or AnyTrust, with custom settings for throughput, privacy, gas tokens, governance, protocol logic, independent product roadmaps, while benefiting from the same EVM+ compatibility introduced by Stylus, also allowing for use with Solidity , C, C++, and Rust to deploy EVM-compatible smart contracts.
Earlier this month, Arbitrum Orbit added support for custom gas tokens, allowing the Orbit chain to select specific ERC-20 tokens as gas fees. The importance of this functional support is self-evident and will help Orbit Chain to enhance the utility of its own tokens and expand its ecosystem.
According to Foresight News, there are currently 18 projects disclosed that will utilize Arbitrum Orbit to launch the Orbit chain. These projects mainly involve areas such as gaming, derivatives, liquidity, and NFTs. They hope to leverage the advantages of low-cost transactions/interactions, high throughput, customizable gas fees, customizable governance, and flexible security models offered by the Orbit chain.
Additionally, Arbitrum has partnered with Rollup-As-A-Service platforms Caldera, AltLayer, and Conduit to enable developers to launch their own custom Rollups.
Xai is an Arbitrum Orbit L3 game-specific chain (utilizing Anytrust technology) co-developed by Offchain Labs, the team behind Arbitrum, and managed by the Xai Foundation. Xai documents show that Offchain Labs will develop and provide services for the Xai blockchain under the guidance of the Xai Foundation, and will also provide ongoing marketing support for the Xai network and ecosystem.
Tailored specifically for gaming, Xai aims to provide an abstracted wallet and account experience for gamers, higher gas and contract limits for developers, and a fully decentralized ecosystem that promotes trust among all participants and transparency.
The main goal of the Xai Foundation is to foster the development of developers and games within the XAI blockchain ecosystem, attract third-party developers and games to join the platform, and facilitate effective marketing strategies for games deployed on Xai.
Xai has also launched its token, Xai, through the 43rd Binance Launchpad. Xai token serves as the primary token within the game ecosystem and is used for in-game payments for games and virtual items. Ex Populus, a game studio, is the first developer to deploy games on Xai and is currently developing two games, “Final Form” and “LAMOverse”. Xai has already launched its mainnet, and according to the Xai roadmap, the in-chain trading card game “Final Form” will be released in April.
Frame is an Arbitrum Orbit L2 project built for creators and collectors, built using the Arbitrum Nitro technology stack, and will launch mainnet on January 31st.
In December 2023, Frame announced that it had completed a new round of financing, with participation from Electric Capital, 9gag founder Ray Chan, Luca Netz and former Sushiswap CEO 0xMaki.
RARI Chain is an EVM equivalent chain built on Arbitrum and will be decentralized by the RARI holder community and RARI DAO. Rarible will also integrate RARI Chain into the Rarible protocol (NFT marketplace), as well as into Rarible X, a turnkey marketplace solution.
RARI Chain allows users low transaction costs and supports payments via credit card in ETH, USDC or USD. This is achieved through RARI Chain’s integration with Arbitrum Anytrust data availability.
RARI Chain has also partnered with Caldera, Gelato, LayerZero, Magic, Rarible, Thirdweb, and WalletConnect, among others. For example, LayerZero enables developers to create collections that can be seamlessly transferred between chains using the ONFT standard without fragmentation or external risks. The gasless minting on RARI Chain is powered by Gelato, and Thirdweb has introduced Account Abstraction and fiat payments to the chain.
In October 2023, Cometh, a Web3 game and DApp development platform, announced that it would cooperate with AltLayer (Rollup as a Service project) and Arbitrum to deploy Layer3 Rollup “Muster”. Among them, AltLayer will enable developers to launch highly modular application customization Rollups.
Cometh will also launch card game Cosmik Battle on Muster, leveraging Arbitrum Orbit’s massive scalability potential, low cost, and fast confirmation times.
Syndr is an institutional-grade options and futures trading protocol, and its Syndr Chain is an application-specific Layer3 Rollup that will be launched as an Arbitrum Orbit chain and operated in collaboration with Caldera. Currently, the Syndr Chain has been deployed on the Arbitrum Goerli testnet.
Syndr abstracts the underlying architecture to achieve a seamless trading experience. Additionally, Syndr does not charge transaction fees to traders, ensuring that all transactions can be conducted without gas fees or MetaMask pop-ups.
Meliora is an Arbitrum Orbit L3 for creating fixed income/credit based application ecosystems by ensuring fast, cost-effective transaction processing using the Arbitrum Orbit Rollup Stack. Meliora contributor Volatilis is also developing a fixed income and periodic clearing free lending protocol, the CREDIT Protocol.
Meliora uses MELIORA or CREDIT to pay gas fees. According to Meliora’s official website, Meliora’s native token MELIORA aims to build an ecosystem focused on collaboration and economic incentives, which can be specifically reflected in sequencer, Gas, MEV fee sharing, validator staking, governance and Gas tokens.
The CREDIT Protocol previously stated at the end of November 2023 that it would launch the second quarter test network on December 1, allowing users to test and earn retroactive Meliora token airdrop points at the same time. However, no relevant progress was released subsequently.
OurSong is a social music NFT platform. In April 2022, the developer behind it, Our Happy Company, completed a US$7.5 million seed round of financing, led by Infinity Ventures and Animoca Brands, with participation from Cherubic Ventures, Circle Ventures, etc.
Our Happy Company was co-founded by famous musician and producer John Legend, KKBOX founder Chris Lin and Twitch founder Kevin Lin. The company’s flagship product OurSong aims to provide a fairer way to provide digital creation services, monetize their work and build community.
Arbitrum disclosed in October last year that OurSong had joined the Orbit chain ecosystem, but the two parties did not disclose further progress.
Deri Protocol is a decentralized derivatives protocol that has launched Deri V4 on the Arbitrum mainnet with the support of AltLayer in late November 2023. Deri Protocol says that leveraging the Arbitrum Orbit, Deri V4 is expected to enhance Arbitrum’s coverage across various L1 and L2 networks.
Hook Protocol is an NFT derivative DEX that supports both perpetual and options. It has released the Hook Odyssey testnet preview in November. Odyssey is a derivative DEX focused on NFTs, deployed on the custom Arbitrum Orbit Chain.
Superposition is a DeFi native Layer3 built on top of Arbitrum, providing a native, permissionless order book, allowing any developer to take advantage of shared deep liquidity, and also providing a seamless user experience through account abstraction.
Superposition’s roadmap includes Superposition Layer (building an L3 chain on Arbitrum One), Superposition DEX, and cross-chain. Superposition is leveraging Orbit technology to enable dedicated throughput, native account abstraction, and higher performance/lower cost for Stylus.
Rollup-as-a-service protocol AltLayer launched on January 10th Nitrogen, an Arbitrum Orbit public testnet using Celestia as a modular DA, secured with Arbitrum Nitro fraud proofs, and integrated with Celestia Blobstream on Arbitrum Sepolia.
With Nitrogen, L2 transaction data is written to Celestia as blobs rather than published as Ethereum call data. Once the data is attested by the Celestia validator set, the generated DA proof is stored in the Blobstream DA contract on Ethereum, making the calldata cost almost negligible.
AltLayer said that with Celestia, developers can now deploy Orbit chains like smart contracts with minimal setup time or overhead.
Parallel Network is a full-chain Layer2 scaling solution built on Ethereum and powered by Arbitrum Orbit, designed to unify the liquidity of any chain into one place. Parallel Network is powered by Arbitrum’s Nitro stack, Conduit, and cross-chain interoperability protocol Socket.
Parallel Network also provides support for Parallel’s ERC-4337 account abstraction through a partnership with account abstraction infrastructure Pimlico.
The Parallel Network mainnet is open to developers and currently allows users to bridge ETH to Parallel through an early access program. Parallel’s official website has an airdrop section, but no detailed information has been disclosed.
Layer2 network Kinto was originally a KYC-compliant Layer2 network based on OP Stack, designed to connect financial institutions and real-world assets through DeFi. In November last year, Kinto decided to launch as part of the Arbitrum Orbit ecosystem.
Kinto is an L2 Rollup based on Arbitrum Nitro technology. It operates as an Optimistic Rollup parallel to Arbritrum One and Nova, providing KYC, insurance, AML, and fraud monitoring at the blockchain level. All participants undergo KYC verification, and the network continuously runs AML checks on all participants. Only verified participants are able to execute transactions.
The governance and utility token of the Kinto network, KINTO, is allocated 60% to community members, with the majority being distributed to users and developers building on it. 25% is allocated to Pre-Seed and Seed round investors, as well as advisors (with a three-year vesting period), and 15% is allocated to team members (with a three-year vesting period).
According to Kinto documentation, the network will be fully released in February 2024, and Engen (trial release) has been started.
Avive World is a DePin and UBI project on Arbitrum and a token-gated community that launched the Avive testnet on Arbitrum Orbit in partnership with AltLayer.
Avive World uses the Proof of Network (PON) mechanism to encourage users to actively develop social relationships in the Avive ecosystem and reward users for their meaningful participation, contribution and support within the community.
Partners listed on Avive World’s official website include Arbitrum, OKX, AltLayer, Biconomy, Particle Network, etc.
Fiefdom is an Orbit chain powered by Arbitrum Anytrust, designed for gaming and trading in the Metaverse. As a Layer3 network, Fiefdom provides low-latency, low-cost transactions. FIEF token serves as the gas token of the Fiefdom network.
Its Fief Protocol is a multi-chain platform that allows trading of Metaverse assets and earning rewards through the FIEF token, with decentralized fee sharing.
Powered by Arbitrum Nitro, Alpha Dune Network is a loyalty-driven, gaming-focused chain. Caldera will help Alpha Dune launch and manage dedicated rollups for its Web3 gaming applications such as Houndrace and Dune Crown. Alpha Dune will also use Celestia as its primary data availability solution.
Polychain Monsters, a multi-chain NFT collection and gaming ecosystem, previously stated in October last year that it would cooperate with AltLayer to introduce a full-chain monster battle system. Additionally, Polychain Monsters will launch custom chains using Arbitrum Orbit chains.
Sanko GameCorp is an on-chain game studio that plans to release a game console and arcade “Dream Machine” built natively on Arbitrum. Sanko GameCorp plans to launch Orbit chain via Caldera.
https://sankodreammachine.net/
Reference: https://docs.arbitrum.io/launch-orbit-chain/orbit-gentle-introduction