Why Ethereum Scaler Arbitrum is Breaking the Odyssey NFT Campaign

It can be difficult to extrapolate the exact differences between a good sustainable product and temporary economic incentives in the crypto world.

Crypto-native products are extremely clumsy, asking users to jump through any number of weird hoops just to move some money around. But if moving around that money means you can make even more money, that product can have tremendous traction.

DeFi offers another excellent example of this dynamic: airdrops, yield farms, and so on. The same murky dynamics are at play when the team-2 bridge service Hop Protocol and the Ethereum scaler Arbitrum joined forces for a unique campaign.

Before you dig in: Hop is an entry and exit from various layer-2 scaling solutions. With Hop, you can move money from Polygon to Arbitrum, and from Ethereum to Optimism (and back again). Although such bridges already exist, many of them often have a waiting period before you can withdraw your money.

For example, it can take a week to withdraw bridge-based funds from Arbitrum. Yep. (For Arbitrum, check out our Learn article that delves deep into this Ethereum scaling solution.)

The activity of both products is flourishing. Arbitrum, at least for a brief moment, even saw higher gas charges than Ethereum’s main network.

The reason behind this massive increase is Arbitrum’s so-called Enter the Odyssey campaign.

For two months, the team behind the scaling solution expected to distribute various NFTs to users who perform unique tasks within the Arbitrum ecosystem. We come to why this expectation has failed in an instant.

The task for the first week (which began on June 21) was simply to build a bridge over assets to Arbitrum from a selected number of crypto bridges. In addition, per Arbitrum, “Users who use the bridge that ends up getting the most volume at the end of the week will also be able to claim a bonus NFT.”

Which do you think won out of the around 20 bridges available?

That’s right, the Hop Protocol – and it was not even close.

Although the campaign seemed well-designed and inclusive, Arbitrum had to take a break from the Odyssey on Thursday.

“Due to the heavy load placed on the chain and causing higher than normal gas charges, we have decided that it is best to pause Odyssey until Nitro is released, so that all communities and projects within Arbitrum continue to have a friction – free experience, “The team tweeted on Wednesday.

Nitro, by the way, is another piece of scaling technology that will be put in place shortly, according to the project. At the moment, Arbitrum is slowing down the network when there is extreme capacity. Nitro really wanted to take off these exercise wheels.

Finally, Arbitrum has been brought to its knees thanks to the incentive program, which seems to be a poor result given the fact that it is intended to help cryptoscaling.

When it comes to Hop, however, the service worked excellently, with more than 165,000 new users.

Unfortunately for Arbitrum, Hop may have been too good a product. After all, users could have chosen a number of other bridges.

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