Following successful testnet, Arbitrum releases Nitro upgrade

The recently released Nitro update is tailored to reduce transaction time, and provide developers with an additional level of security

  • Published:
  • 05/09/2022 03:54 PM

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The Arbitrum development team has announced that the Arbitrum network's Nitro upgrade has been completed. This is an exciting step for the network, increasing transaction throughput and reducing operational expenses. Developers will also benefit from a better user experience, building applications directly on top of the Arbitrum network.


The Ethereum Layer 2 network has effectively upgraded the existing Arbitrum One network to Arbitrum Nitro on Wednesday. Offchain Labs, which is developing Arbitrum, announced the completion of the upgrade in a tweet. Now that Arbitrum Nitro has been launched, it can handle more transactions than before. This upgrade will make the network even more robust and functional.

Offchain Labs said, "This new version of Arbitrum is much more efficient and will allow us to bring our Blockchain technology to a whole new group of people." This update comes with several key improvements, including an increased number of transactions, an upgraded wallet client, and an upgrade to the blockchain protocol. This was done to improve its scalability, allowing Arbitrum to handle more transactions in real-time.


The latest upgrade to the Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution, Arbitrum, has successfully included a new feature that could further reduce user transaction costs. "Nitro" is an upgrade that allows trailing zero bytes to be removed from transaction batches, resulting in significant savings.

The new Nitro upgrade has been released as a new prover, which can analyze interactive fraud proofs by utilizing WebAssembly code. The Arbitrum engine can now be written and compiled using languages and tools like those used for other projects rather than being written in a custom-designed language and compiler.

The Nitro update is designed to improve the speed of transaction validation by implementing a faster and more efficient computation engine and provides developers with an additional level of security using WebAssembly compilation.

Offchain Labs CEO and co-founder Steven Goldfeder seems optimistic, stating that the update would "massively increase network capacity and significantly reduce costs, should attract more projects to the ecosystem."

With effortless scaling technology, Arbitrum is now successfully deployed on top of the Ethereum mainnet. This added layer adds much-needed capacity to the Ethereum ecosystem and forms the foundation for the next generation of distributed applications.

Arbitrum is a protocol, a blockchain, and an on-chain contract execution engine. It's aimed to serve the Ethereum community, including users and developers. With this system, it has become possible to build decentralized markets, virtual worlds, games & much more.

The writer is the founder at yMedia. He ventured into crypto in 2013 and is an ETH maximalist. Twitter: @bhardwajshash