Offchain Labs launches Arbitrum Nova blockchain for gaming and social media
Offchain Labs, the developer of the Ethereum scaling solution Arbitrum, today announced the launch of a new blockchain named Nova designed for Web3 games and social media applications.
Nova is the second chain launched in the Arbitrum ecosystem alongside Arbitrum One, which was designed to support the scaling of decentralized finance and non-fungible tokens.
Speaking to SiliconANGLE in an interview, Steven Goldfeder, co-founder and CEO of Offchain Labs, said that Arbitrum One already brings Ethereum transactions for decentralized apps down about 97% with high security. It uses “zero-knowledge digests” that aggregate off-chain transactions before sending them into batches. It allows them to execute faster and with lower fees.
In turn, it does most transactions at around 30 to 40 cents on average, which is far better than Ethereum for creating NFTs or running most DeFi transactions.
But, Goldfeder explained, certain other applications that need to do multiple transactions would find it extremely burdensome, so the team developed a different technology to launch Arbitrum Nova.
“There is another class of projects that have a high volume of transactions and massive user bases and are not necessarily blockchain native and thus do not have the appetite to pay such fees,” he said. “Two of these types of projects are games and social applications. They look and they say they want to launch on Arbitrum, but they need an ultra-low fee.”
Nova is built on a technology known as AnyTrust, which enables transactions with ultra-low costs, even lower than Arbitrum One, and it still delivers high security, speed and scalability of transactions. It does so by certifying and validating the transaction batches, posting only the certifications, not all the data, to the Ethereum blockchain. The end result is significant cost savings.
“Game and social app developers are often faced with a difficult choice,” said Goldfeder. “‘Do I want security or do I want ultra-low fees?’ They can be very principled about security, but if their game or app doesn’t work in that regime, they’re going to have a tough choice.”
As a result, he explained, Arbitrum sought a solution that could “fill that gap” by delivering ultra-low fees and still providing high security.
Arbitrum Nova is the perfect platform for games and social media apps because they are cost sensitive and have high transaction volume. Games tend to mint new items and currency consistently and players are constantly trading between each other, high fees would stifle the in-game economy. Social media apps rely on scaling messages between users and high fees will quickly destroy the ability to communicate freely.
Social media site Reddit will launch its Community Points on Arbitrum Nova. Community Points allow users to earn cryptographic tokens that allow them to own their own reputation points on the Ethereum blockchain, but shortly after launch, the site sought scaling partners in the Scaling Bake-Off. Arbitrum was named the winner.
In addition to Reddit, several other companies plan to support the launch of Arbitrum Nova, including cryptocurrency exchange FTX, MetaMask developer Consensys, and blockchain infrastructure startup QuickNode, all of which will be initial members of Nova’s Data Availability Committee.
