Why Did I Join the Arbitrum Foundation?
I have spent most of my adult life happily immersed in the field of crypto and specifically off-chain scalability, but my days as an independent are up.
I am joining the Arbitrum Foundation and will be more hands-on with the rollup effort for scaling Ethereum.
This may seem strange to people who view me as an independent rollup bystander.
I have, for the longest time, resisted the urge to join any rollup project and more generally any off-chain scalability project. The reason why I have stayed independent for so long is simple. It put me in a unique position to praise and provide constructive feedback to any project.
It has been a really long time too. I have spent most of my adult life happily immersed in the field of crypto and specifically off-chain scalability. About 10 years now.
Given the type of skills I possess. I convinced myself that I was best suited to bring technical people together and help get them up to speed on why the techniques for off-chain protocols was an important solution for blockchain scalability.
To highlight some of that work:
Early technical explainers for the lightning network [1],
Attempting to systemise the fast-moving field layer-2 protocols [5,6],
Educational efforts focused on layer-2 [7,8,9] (including this substack!).
At heart, I am both an engineer and a researcher, who likes to explain how technology works. So I have simply done what I do best — conceptualise, systemise and teach.
The field of off-chain scalability is around ~8 years old now. It has exploded beyond my own comprehension and at a lightning fast pace. If I had to guess, I’d imagine there are >1,000 developers working on fundamental building blocks for off-chain protocols and even during this bear market the rate of growth is truly exponential.
It does not feel like 8 years has passed. But, it is really no longer 2015, or 2019, or even 2022. The community is so large and diverse now. A lot of the work I did in the early days, alongside a host of wonderful contributors, has and will continue to fade into the ether. I am happy that it will.
With that in mind, I came to the conclusion that my time as an independent in the context of rollups was up. It is time for me to join a project and help push the needle forward for rollups towards mass adoption by every financial institution on the planet.
I am a long-term fan of many rollup projects. From ZkSync’s pragmatic focus on product, StarkNet’s very opinionated virtual machine, Optimism’s spread of culture and public goods, and Scroll’s indisputable alignment with Ethereum’s core.
All the teams are great and I am still very bullish on their individual approaches.
So the question is — why Arbitrum?
I’ll be at the Arbitrum Foundation. It will allow me to continue my work on Ethereum, education and public goods. I don’t expect my day-to-day to change greatly and hope to continue publishing factual content about rollups.
But there is a longer story, so strap in.
How I Came To Learn About Arbitrum
The first time I heard about Arbitrum was at CESC’17 where I met Steven Goldfeder.
I was already aware of his research. He had worked on escrow protocols and threshold ECDSA alongside authoring the cryptocurrency book. I caught the opportunity to say hey and he mentioned that he was working on a blockchain scalability solution using refereed delegation.
I didn’t know anything about that technique and like all good academics he kept it a closely guarded secret. The research was due to be published imminently. A few months later, I found the project was published at USENIX and it was called Arbitrum.
I read the paper and I thought I had an idea what it was about.
Around this time I was organising a workshop (in co-operation with Binary District) to bring together off-chain researchers and projects. I invited Harry Kalodner to present Arbitrum at the workshop. You can see us in the picture above and the video is still available. He talks about AnyTrust too!
It was a great talk and again I thought I had an idea what it is was about.
This brings us to ~2019.
I was having a chat with my friend Malte Moser, (Harry’s colleague at Princeton). He told me that Harry was supposed to be working on Block Sci, but disappeared into the ether to work on Arbitrum full-time as a startup. A few months later, the announcement of Offchain’s labs funding round appeared.
I was excited to see them take the paper from theory to practice and I thought the story would end here. After all, I didn’t have a close relationship with the folks at Princeton.
Understanding The Problem Solved By Arbitrum
A few months later, I was working with Chris “The Radish” Buckland on some state channel research. To keep the story short, we accidentally replicated some of the work at the heart of Arbitrum. This led to a shared telegram group where I had an opportunity ask a bunch of questions about what Offchain Lab’s was building.
Something about their answers didn’t really feel right. They kept saying they were building a state channel, but it didn’t look like a state channel at all.
I don’t remember the exact moment, maybe near the end of ~2019, but I eventually realised they were not working on state channels at all.
They solved a fundamental problem that was plaguing the Plasma community.
What do I mean by this? Let’s highlight the two fundamental problems for off-chain scalability:
Database. A technology that can create an off-chain database and allow it to inherit security from the main chain.
Synchrony. A technology that allows updates to be synchronised across two or more off-chain databases.
For the longest time, the state channel community tried to solve the problem of creating an off-chain database (including myself), but hindsight tells us that channels are best suited as a synchrony solution alongside a host of different synchrony techniques.
The Plasma (and commitchain) community were working on the right technology to solve the off-chain database problem. They were plagued with a complicated design space and lacked the right abstractions to tackle the problem. That is why nearly all Plasma solutions (above) focused on payments and limited scripting mechanisms.
Remarkably, the Arbitrum paper solved one of the big problems in Plasma, enabling generalised smart contracts that inherit the main chain’s security via fraud proofs. The “AnyTrust” idea was an off-chain data availability committee and they eventually pivoted to enable rollup mode.
I’m sure Offchain Labs eventually came to the same conclusions. It is funny to think in hindsight they did not even have the idea of a centralized Sequencer yet! They were building for a set of decentralized and uncoordinated aggregators.
It was the best of times.
The biggest bottleneck to understanding the leap for Plasma (like the pun?) was a language barrier between the Arbitrum team and the wider Ethereum community. A lot of people didn’t understand what they were building including myself. In hindsight, this was a very useful competitive advantage for Arbitrum as they gained a significant head-start on the implementation.
The telegram chat eventually died as it became ‘crunch time’ for them to launch. But I finally understood what they were building!
Watching Arbitrum Evolve From a Paper to a Dominant Rollup
I was really excited to try out the technology as soon as I could. I was one of the first folks to try out Arbi Swap. It was a demo of running Uniswap on top of Arbitrum. The video is fun to watch and you’ll get to see the old school Arbitrum Bridge.
It was truly a “wow” moment. The gas cost went from ~120k gas on Ethereum to ~4k on Arbitrum. I was finally convinced that I was not senile or eccentric as this was empirical evidence that the off-chain scalability approach could really work.
At this point — the rest is history really.
They launched Arbitrum with interactive fraud proofs. The Ethereum community finally understood what they built and jumped onto the Arbitrum spaceship. The project is now on the path to decentralising and I hope to help them along the way with that mission.
In fact, there is a good chance that you have used Arbitrum and I’d love to hear your stories about using it!
Please drop a comment with your story or even just like this post as a way to let me know.
So Why Did I Join?
They offered me a smol brain NFT — jk.
I decided to join as I have been impressed by how the project has evolved over the years.
I have always found it remarkable how the three founders, Steven/Ed/Harry, rarely attend the crypto conference circuit. They are simply working day-in-day-out, in a very consistent manner, on Arbitrum alongside a team they have built up who share the same ethos.
Additionally, I have always found it easy to understand how Arbitrum works and their thought process on several topics:
Code is easy to read,
Research posts are informative,
Team is always at hand to answer any questions.
Finally — and perhaps most importantly — I have sent them several ideas in the past and some of those ideas were picked up. It has been really fun to watch my recommendations play out in practice. Like anyone, I appreciate being listened too, especially since I am always right (joke). At the very least, it does help demonstrate that my thought process is in line with the Arbitrum team.
Closing off
I am joining the Arbitrum Foundation and not Offchain Labs.
I will work closely with the Offchain Labs team and I expect it will indeed be a complementary relationship.
But, at the end of the day, my duty is to Arbitrum and wider Ethereum eco-system. I hope to be held accountable and judged on that single goal since our job is to scale Ethereum.
congrats sir!