Steven Goldfeder of Arbitrum said in a recent interview he thinks it’s a mistake for blockchains to try and compete with Ethereum.
Steven Goldfeder on What’s Coming for Blockchain
Ethereum is the most popular network around. However, its high gas fees and slow speeds in the past have given rise to several Layer-2 blockchain networks that have sought to complement it or aid it along. They realize it’s too big for them to compete with, and they seek to enhance its stability so they can garner solid pieces of the digital pie.
Discussing the differences between Layer-1 and Layer-2 blockchains built atop Ethereum, Goldfeder said:
When it comes to Arbitrum and Layer-2s versus the alternative Layer-1s, the big differentiator is Layer-2s are part of Ethereum. They’re not competitive with Ethereum. The Layer-1s are generally competitive. I have no issue with technical experimentation, and different Layer-1s make different trade-offs when it comes to some of these core properties like security, decentralization, and scalability, and how they try to achieve that.
Goldfeder also said that there really only needs to be one node on Arbitrum that’s honest for the system to work. He commented:
In a protocol like Ethereum, the nodes are always actively participating. They’re all trying to make blocks and you can see this running on the network. At Arbitrum, the way it works is one node goes ahead and posts something. Then, there’s a period where anyone can challenge a transaction before it becomes final.
He also discussed the differences between ZK rollups and optimistic rollups, and explained why he chose to use the latter for Arbitrum:
The core differences between ZK and optimistic rollups are how they do the proof of a transaction’s validity. What our members do is take all these transactions off-chain, and then they send the results back to Ethereum in an efficient data structure. That’s how they scale and get the correctness. ZK rollups give us what’s called validity proof. They say, ‘I’m going to prove to you that those transactions are accurate right here.’ Optimistic rollups do what [are] called fraud proof[s], which is [when] they say, ‘Okay, these are the transactions, these are the results. I’m not giving you proof. Optimistically, just accept my work, but if someone challenges me, that’s when the proof mechanism happens.’ So, that’s the difference between the two.
What’s Next for the Company?
On how the ETH Merge could affect Arbitrum, he said:
Our team is very integrated in Layer-1 development. That includes Ethereum improvement proposal 4844 (which will help the network scale), and there are some synergies that we can explore. I think that EIP-4844 is going to be very important to lowering our costs even more significantly. I think that we’re going to see a continued migration to Layer-2 technologies.
