Exclusive interview with the founder of Arbitrum: 3 people, 9 years, $2 billion market value.

Interview & Writing: Jack, BlockBeats

As a player in the Optimistic Rollup field of the encryption industry, Arbitrum was not initially favored. On one side was the "expansion prince" Optimism team created by core members of the Ethereum Foundation, and on the other side was the ZK Rollup field, which Vitalik called the "ultimate solution." Arbitrum was awkwardly sandwiched in the middle, without a close relationship with the foundation or the conditions to "paint a rosy picture" for investors. From this perspective, Arbitrum can indeed be considered a dark horse in the Ethereum expansion field.

Since last year, despite OP's "Token First" advantage, Arbitrum's TVL and on-chain activity surpassed OP in the following period and opened up a gap with it after Odyssey. In February of this year, the Arbitrum ecosystem became even more lively with the expectation of airdrops, and popular projects such as GMX, Camelot, and Radiant emerged one after another, making Arbitrum the de facto "L2 King". What's even more surprising is that even after the airdrop ended, the development of its ecosystem did not cool down, and even ushered in a new round of meme frenzy for the crypto market with the emergence of AIDOGE.

The sustainable growth of the ecosystem is closely related to the team's efforts and path selection. From Arbitrum One to Nitro, the team has been constantly seeking and solving potential challenges. Of course, Arbitrum did not make the right decisions every step of the way. The "DAO fund gate" in early April had an extremely negative impact on the entire cryptocurrency industry, and some even declared that "DAO governance is no longer existent". Amid industry scrutiny and controversy, Arbitrum has recently launched its new narrative for scalability - Stylus.

The team behind Arbitrum comes from where? How do they view the competition between Optimistic and ZK scaling? What is the story behind the "DAO fund gate" and what new narrative does Stylus have? BlockBeats interviewed Arbitrum founder Ed Felten to address these questions.

From the White House to Web3

Like many "first-tier" Web3 projects, Arbitrum's founder Ed Felten also comes from academia. What sets Ed apart is his legendary experience before entering Web3. In 2003, at the age of 40, Ed Felten became a professor in the Computer Science Department at Princeton University. Two years later, he became the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy (CIPT) at the school. Between 2006 and 2010, he was elected to the board of directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and was later appointed as the chief technology officer of the US Federal Trade Commission. One day in early 2015, Ed received a call from the White House and was invited to serve as the deputy chief technology officer.

Working in the White House changed Ed's definition of many things. During his tenure, he no longer had ample time to study his favorite blockchain technology, but had to spend more time and energy on policy research in areas such as AI education, AI military, and information security. After leaving the White House, Ed became an AI expert. At a computing research association summit in 2018, Ed even commented that "blockchain is not as important as AI." However, in the same year, Ed founded Offchain Labs and officially entered the world of blockchain and Web3.

BlockBeats: Can you briefly introduce your background, Ed?

Ed: Most of my career has been as an academic, a computer science professor at Princeton University, and later a professor at the School of Public Policy. I have worked for the US government three times, and in the last two years of the Obama administration, I was the Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the US government, serving as a policy advisor to the President on various technology policy issues. Around 2012, I began academic research in the field of cryptocurrency and blockchain. In 2014, I started researching blockchain scalability, which ultimately led me to work on Arbitrum. The idea behind Arbitrum was initially conceived in 2014, when I developed the idea of interactive fraud proof in a conversation about scalability issues.

However, in early 2015, I was hired by the White House to serve as the Deputy Chief Technology Officer. So I left my academic position and worked at the White House for about two years. After the Obama administration left office, I returned to Princeton University and became a professor again. After that, I began to think about what areas of research I should pursue. One day, two PhD students, Harry and Stephen, came to my office and proposed turning my idea from 2014 into a viable product. So the three of us formed a core team and created an "academic version" of Arbitrum.

Ed Felten (second from the right), who served as Deputy Chief Technology Officer at the White House. Image source: internet

We spent about a year and in the summer of 2018, we published a peer-reviewed paper on Arbitrum, which was the first publication on Arbitrum. At that time, we realized that we knew how to build something of commercial value that solved pain points for Ethereum users, namely Ethereum's transaction fees and limited throughput, which are two sides of the same coin, so we decided to start a company. This was the beginning of Offchain Labs' journey, and it was three years after the academic paper was published when we released our first product on the mainnet.

BlockBeats: Did you have time to think about blockchain technology during your time in the White House?

Ed: There are still some. My work involves all areas of technology and policy, and the biggest project may be to promote the policy process of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Of course, I also try to promote discussions about blockchain technology among different government departments, and I have indeed done some work in blockchain technology, although it was very early. At that time, this technology had not developed enough to attract the attention of senior government officials, which has changed to some extent. I think the current government's attention to blockchain technology is much greater than it was in 2015 to 2016.

BlockBeats: You are one of the scholars who paid early attention to blockchain in the academic community. However, at a academic summit, you mentioned that blockchain, as a technological innovation, may not be as important as AI. Why did you ultimately choose blockchain as your entrepreneurial direction?

Ed: The most important reason is that in my cryptocurrency research work, we have discovered a technology that can be commercialized. We can solve a problem that is important to many people, and we know how to establish a company that can make an impact. However, my research in artificial intelligence is not the same. In the field of artificial intelligence, I study public policy issues, such as what the government and large institutions should do, and what is best for the public. But I don't have the opportunity to start a company in this field because I don't have the kind of innovation that can drive economic value in this field. Therefore, there is no opportunity for me in the field of artificial intelligence.

In 2018, Ed Felten gave a speech on AI technology at the Computing Power Research Association Summit. Image source from the internet.

From a long-term perspective of human history, the artificial intelligence and machine learning innovations currently taking place may be more important than blockchain innovation. However, from my personal standpoint, I can find opportunities and have a commercial impact in the blockchain field, but not in the field of artificial intelligence. That's why I chose to work on Arbitrum instead of a "nominal artificial intelligence company". Perhaps in another universe, I could be an artificial intelligence entrepreneur, but in this universe, blockchain is my best destination.

"Remember that idea called Arbitrum?"

Like Ed himself, the idea of Arbitrum also originated from campus. In 2014, Ed proposed the concept of interactive fraud proof. In the era when Ethereum was still unknown, Ed had already started researching the scalability problem of blockchain. In September, several students recommended by their teacher designed a blockchain project based on Ed's research. At the final project presentation, three students in sweaters stood with their arms crossed in front of the audience, explaining what "Arbitrum" written on the whiteboard was. And thus, Arbitrum was born. Of course, it was not until 4 years later that Ed decided to turn Arbitrum into a product and commercialize it.

BlockBeats: Interestingly, you started researching scaling solutions before Ethereum became well-known. Why did you choose scaling solutions as your research direction?

Ed: I have been involved in some other research topics related to Bitcoin, especially in the economics, incentive mechanisms, and consensus issues of Bitcoin. But in early 2014, I became interested in the idea of smart contracts, which can turn a tool that can only hold and transfer tokens into a platform where people can build new types of services and products. I realized that this brought together a series of different ideas that I had been focusing on in my academic work. On the one hand, there is the blockchain and this public, permissionless, and trusted system; on the other hand, there is the thinking around provable and accountable computation, which comes from my work in public policy, where I have been trying to understand how to complete public processes mediated by technology in an open and accountable way.

I realized that smart contracts were the intersection of these things, so in early 2014, I had a lot of exciting ideas about smart contracts. Although I couldn't foresee what the Ethereum ecosystem would look like in the future, I had an idea that combining the idea of general computation with blockchain would bring explosive innovation. However, as a computer system researcher, it was obvious to me that scalability would be a problem. Because the obvious way to do smart contracts is to have every node in your blockchain system execute every step of every smart contract, which would be a big performance bottleneck and was the reason why I became interested in scaling smart contracts in early 2014.

At that time, it was unclear whether Ethereum would become the "ultimate blockchain" supporting smart contracts, but among many candidates, Ethereum appeared to be the leading competitor and the best bet. Regardless of which one of them won, they would face the issue of scalability. Therefore, as an academic researcher, my goal was to identify real-world problems as early as possible and try to develop solutions for them.

BlockBeats: How did the specific idea of Arbitrum come about?

Ed: Actually, the idea that we now call "interactive fraud proof" first appeared in my mind around February or March 2014. At that time, I hosted a conference on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technology in an academic group at Princeton University. It was during this period that I had the idea for Arbitrum. For most of 2014, there was a whiteboard in my office at Princeton University that explained the concept of interactive fraud proof.

When September came around, my colleague Arvind began teaching a course on blockchain technology, and the course project he assigned to the students was to create hands-on projects based on blockchain. A group of students gathered together, and Arvind introduced them to me. I suggested the idea of building an interactive fraud-proof prototype, and the students built a very early version of Arbitrum. Although it was not entirely successful, it explored many ideas. The name Arbitrum was actually given by a student at the conference, and it was the zeroth version of Arbitrum, a system that was completely different from the current Arbitrum in some ways.

Arbitrum's final presentation, image source from the internet

Not long after that, I went to work at the White House. Two years later, when I returned to campus, two PhD students, Harry and Steven, approached me and said, "Hey, do you remember Arbitrum from before? Let's turn it into a product!" After that, we founded the company and after several iterations of the technology, we finally developed the product we have today. It has been a long journey, but worth it.

BlockBeats: What aspect of the Arbitrum idea caught Harry and Steven's attention?

Ed: I think they also see what I see, which is that the scalability of smart contract systems will be an important issue. The limited scale of Ethereum will become a pain point as the user base grows, and that's the first thing.

Secondly, in our understanding of Arbitrum, there are some convergences of ideas that can be built into something bigger and more valuable. Therefore, almost from the first day they came to my office, the three of us had a very consistent understanding, not only of the potential of this technology, but also of the problems we need to solve in order to bridge the gap from an idea to a complete system that solves people's problems. Therefore, I believe that we have this vision together.

Another point I want to make is that when I first returned to academia from a high-pressure government job, I wanted to take some time to reflect. My experience in the White House had changed my worldview and given me new perspectives, so I wanted to think about what kind of work I should be doing. When Harry and Stephen walked into my office, an important part of the answer was that we realized we had very similar visions and goals for this project. For me, this seemed like a great opportunity because the idea of Arbitrum could easily be a successful academic project, but it could also become a successful commercial project with some time.

Arbitrum founding members (from left to right): Ed Felten, Steven Goldfeder, Harry Kalodner, image source from the internet

BlockBeats: What changes have occurred in the roles of the three founders from the beginning of building Arbitrum to the establishment of Offchain Labs?

Ed: In the early days, there were only three of us. We made progress by discussing ideas and there were no clearly defined roles. Each of us was focused on development because we were a small team and everyone was trying to find ways to move things forward. We had a single code repository and everyone worked on it. We also had frequent meetings to review progress. Everyone was thinking about every problem and making open suggestions, and this situation has continued almost constantly.

In 2018, we established the company and our scale began to grow, which led to more refined division of labor and more distinct roles for each of us. Now, each of us has a unique role, although we still have many things to discuss together and make important decisions together, we have become more specialized. Stephen serves as the CEO and largely takes on the company's public image, he pays close attention to everything we do. Harry is the CTO, so he focuses more on ensuring that we build and provide the technology we need. As the Chief Scientist, I am responsible for research and mainly think about what Arbitrum needs to develop in order for us to continue to make progress. So, I think more about what difficulties we will encounter six months or a year from now, what we need to prepare and develop, and what are the core technical challenges we need to solve.

BlockBeats: This also leads to the question I have been wanting to ask, why did you choose Ethereum as your underlying layer?

Ed: I think there are several reasons for this. Some are that Ethereum has been and still is a place for developers, but ultimately it is the Ethereum community. The openness of Ethereum and the community it has built is very valuable to us, so we want to be part of the Ethereum community not only because of the value of the community itself and the value of connecting to it, but also because Ethereum has successfully built the kind of community that we want to build around Arbitrum. Therefore, in our view, building on top of it is the right choice. Arbitrum is a layer two technology that requires a layer one. We decided early on that we wanted to use Ethereum as our layer one for the reasons I described, and I think this has proven to be a very wise decision. We are still very happy to be exclusive to Ethereum.

Ethereum Foundation, OP, and zkEVM

As mentioned at the beginning of the article, Arbitrum, which has chosen the Optimistic technology path, is actually in a relatively awkward position, facing competition pressure from the OP team on one hand, and questioning the path of ZK narrative on the other. However, the team's choice of Optimistic seems particularly firm, as it was at the founding of Offchain and still is in 2023 when the ZK track is collectively exerting force. Where does Ed's confidence in Optimistic Rollup come from? And how does he view the upcoming ZK track outbreak?

BlockBeats: Offchain Labs was officially established in 2018, at which time Ethereum's "scaling prince" Optimism team had already emerged and seemed to have a closer relationship with the Ethereum Foundation. How did Arbitrum view its competition with the Optimism team during this period?

Ed: I believe that in the early days, many people in the Ethereum community assumed that Optimism would win the Layer2 competition, and even if they didn't assume it, they would at least consider them a dark horse in the field. However, we believe that we have the technology and team to effectively solve the scalability problem, so I have always believed in what we are doing in Arbitrum and believe that it will bring great value. From what we can see now, I think this has been proven.

Personally, I believe that having only a single Layer2 solution for Ethereum is not healthy, and having a diverse range of Layer2 solutions is valuable for Ethereum. In my view, the Ethereum Foundation shares this perspective and is actively working to push the Ethereum ecosystem in this direction. This is one aspect of Ethereum that I really appreciate - the Foundation and community decide the direction of Ethereum through an open and collaborative process, which reminds me of the early development of the internet and initiatives like the Internet Engineering Task Force. I think they did a great job in being open, listening, and incorporating many perspectives from people with different technical approaches, from different countries, from different companies, and with different interests and viewpoints. Overall, I value this greatly and am truly grateful for the efforts made by the Ethereum community and leadership to drive this process forward.

BlockBeats: What support has the Ethereum Foundation provided to Arbitrum during its development process?

Ed: I believe that the Foundation and Vitalik have always maintained an open attitude towards communication. When we advocate for something, they can give us a fair "hearing". In terms of financial support, the Foundation has always tried to remain neutral and not provide financial support to different Layer2 teams. But as an honest intermediary, they negotiate with us, talk to us, cooperate with us, and try to push things forward. I think they are doing a good job.

Arbitrum has a good relationship with the Ethereum Foundation and their leadership, which has developed over time. Overall, I believe the Ethereum Foundation has done a great job in building a strong Layer2 ecosystem. We certainly value the Ethereum Foundation and what they do, and we consider ourselves part of the Ethereum community. When Ethereum succeeds, we will also succeed.

Offchain Labs and the wider Arbitrum community have been working hard to be a "good citizen" of the Ethereum community. We brought in the leading client Prism team to contribute to and help the Ethereum ecosystem, and also because we believe that understanding what is happening at the Ethereum layer and the discussions and communications happening here are valuable.

BlockBeats: Do you still believe that Optimistic Rollup is a more ideal technological path in the Layer2 field?

Ed: Of course, I believe that Optimistic Rollup is still the best choice. Even if the Arbitrum team were to start over with Layer2, I would still choose this technology path. Optimistic Rollup actually has many advantages over other alternative solutions, such as ZK Rollup. The biggest advantage is its simplicity and lower cost. Optimistic Rollup was launched on the mainnet much earlier than ZK Rollup, and this is not a coincidence. Optimistic Rollup is simpler and more flexible, allowing us to innovate in other areas that are more important in practice, bringing a lot of value to users.

An excellent example is data compression. The biggest cost of Rollup is calling data when it is released on the Ethereum mainnet, so it is very important to compress data as efficiently as possible to reduce costs. In the Optimistic Rollup proof system, we can choose almost any compression method we want, which means we can achieve better compression at lower cost. If we switch the Optimistic Rollup proof system in Arbitrum to a zero-knowledge fraud proof system today, users will not notice any difference except for a slightly higher cost.

BlockBeats: In an interview, you mentioned that zero-knowledge fraud proof is the "solution of the future" and will always be. Do you still hold this view?

Ed: I think I was right, but I want to be cautious on this issue. What I meant at the time was the idea of using the EVM solution with zero-knowledge fraud proof as the only fraud proof mechanism. Zero-knowledge proof as a component of the entire protocol is indeed very valuable, such as the new data availability system EIP-4844 that Ethereum is promoting. This data availability system relies on KZG commitments, which includes a type of zero-knowledge proof system. So I think it makes sense to use zero-knowledge proof as a tool locally in the protocol, but the idea of using zero-knowledge proof for the entire Rollup protocol from start to finish does not have much advantage in practice and does increase costs.

BlockBeats: However, many ZK Rollup projects have launched their mainnets this year, and the heat and competition in the zkEVM track are also high. Now, compared to the zero-knowledge proof technology path, does Optimistic Rollup still have advantages?

Ed: First of all, I think the competition in this field is healthy, which is good for users. We welcome competition and also believe that we have the best solution. We believe that users will continue to choose Arbitrum, but we must prove it every day by constantly providing better services. I believe we can do it.

Actually, zkEVM has a huge advantage for users when it comes to Arbitrum, which is that users can now make a real and fair comparison between the services provided by us and the ZK system, rather than comparing the actual performance of Arbitrum with the expected performance of the ZK system. In my opinion, Optimistic Rollup has a clear advantage in areas such as data compression, where users can not only see that the fees of Arbitrum are lower than those of the ZK system, but also that these fees are sufficient to cover the cost of operating the network. Obviously, in the long run, this means that users can achieve better economic benefits.

BlockBeats: However, during the time of receiving the ARB airdrop, the Arbitrum network seemed to have experienced congestion, causing many people to question the network's performance.

Ed: Yes, just like Ethereum, Arbitrum also has a certain capacity. If the demand exceeds this capacity, then the gas fee will increase. However, the congestion that occurred on the ARB distribution day was not actually caused by congestion on the Arbitrum network itself, but rather congestion on the airdrop website. This was just an old-fashioned website congestion problem. On the day of the ARB airdrop, the website server experienced an unprecedented level of traffic, resulting in congestion of the web infrastructure, but the Arbitrum network itself performed well.

It's not just the ARB airdrop website that experienced server congestion, other websites such as block explorers also faced website congestion. The day of the token distribution was the most severe congestion experienced by many servers, including those not related to Arbitrum. You can ask people who run block explorers or other website servers which day was the busiest, and they will tell you it was the day of the Arbitrum airdrop. It must be acknowledged that this situation was unfortunate. We have tested the infrastructure against expected levels of traffic, but in reality, the traffic on that day was much higher than we predicted.

"DAO Fund Gate" and the New Narrative of Stylus

In April of this year, the Arbitrum Foundation was accused of transferring nearly $1 billion worth of ARB Tokens to its foundation wallet address before the community governance proposal AIP-1 was passed, causing a strong reaction from the community. Comments such as "DAO is a joke" and "Web3 is not decentralized at all" quickly spread on social media. However, the "DAO fund gate" does not seem to have had much impact on Arbitrum's progress. In the first two months, the team launched a new product called Stylus after Nitro and gave it a new narrative.

BlockBeats: There has been a lot of discussion about the issue of the Arbitrum team transferring tokens before the DAO governance vote. Can Ed provide a detailed explanation of the events?

Ed: There are actually some misunderstandings in this matter, which is due to poor communication with the community during the Token release, and this is the problem of the Arbitrum team. But what I want to clarify is that these Tokens have not been transferred, and no transaction has transferred these Tokens to anywhere. The 750 million ARB Tokens (about 1 billion US dollars) that people are complaining about were originally intended to be distributed to the Arbitrum Foundation in the Genesis event. We set up multiple accounts for the airdrop, including a team account, an investor account, an Arbitrum Foundation account, an individual airdrop account, and a DAO airdrop and DAO treasury account. The 750 million US dollars Tokens allocated to the Arbitrum Foundation in the Genesis event have been in the Foundation's account from the beginning.

The reason for the misunderstanding is that there is a Token distribution chart in the Genesis announcement on the Arbitrum official website, which includes a section called Arbitrum DAO, which includes the Token quota of the DAO treasury and the Token quota of the foundation. However, this chart did not distinguish between the 750 million Tokens of the Arbitrum Foundation and the 360 million Tokens of the Arbitrum DAO treasury, leading the community to believe that the Tokens in the Arbitrum Foundation address had been transferred over, but in fact these Tokens had not been transferred. To be fair, if the Tokens had really been transferred, then the dissatisfaction of the DAO community would have been reasonable, but they were not. People were unhappy, so they voted against the original AIP-1.

BlockBeats: Why do we need to conduct governance voting to "approve" this decision when the initial allocation has already been given to the foundation?

Ed: Regarding the initial vote for AIP-1, it must be acknowledged that this is another mistake made by the team. The community should not have been asked to approve something that has already happened, or to agree to something that has already taken place.

Even in Web3, some things initially need to happen in a centralized way. For example, there wouldn't be community airdrops without the initial distribution of tokens or a foundation acting as a legal entity. And in order for the foundation to become a legal entity, it needs a board of directors, bylaws, and all the other things that any legal organization needs to have structure. However, the team believes that it's good to have the DAO community approve these necessary and already happened things, because these decisions are all uncontroversial.

However, the community later became angry about the "750 million token incident" and voted down the proposal. At this point, the Arbitrum Foundation realized that it would be best to start over and do better. That's why there are AIP-1.1 and AIP-1.2, which are the team's second attempt and have been done very well. If I remember correctly, 98% of the votes were in favor. The code for these on-chain operation proposals has now been written and has passed security audits.

In short, my view is that the actions taken by the team are reasonable and fair, but due to poor communication, the expectations of the DAO community are different from the actual situation. However, from another perspective, this also reflects a very good point, which is that it shows that the DAO does have control. If someone thinks that the Arbitrum Foundation is only acting according to its own will and that the opinions of the DAO are irrelevant, I believe this matter has shown them that the DAO does have actual control. I hope that once AIP-1.1 and 1.2 are passed through the DAO's on-chain voting, it will be clear that the Foundation is developing in accordance with the DAO's wishes and that the Foundation is indeed responsible to the DAO.

BlockBeats: "DAO Fund Gate" has had a significant impact on the Arbitrum community, but things have been gradually improving since AIP-1.1 and 1.2. We also noticed that Arbitrum did not stagnate due to this incident, and the team has been vigorously promoting the development of the new product Stylus. Can Ed explain the narrative of Stylus?

Ed: Stylus is a new feature that we are currently developing and we are very excited about it. This is an "EVM+" approach, which means that Arbitrum will continue to be compatible with Ethereum, and anything that runs on Ethereum should run on Arbitrum.

The ability that Stylus brings is the ability to write smart contracts in any programming language. Stylus will compile it into WebAssembly, and then you can run it as a smart contract on the Arbitrum chain. You can call it just like you would call an EVM contract, and in fact, people interacting with the Stylus contract don't even need to know that it's a Stylus contract. Despite being written in a different language, the contract will seamlessly interact with the EVM chain.

So what are the advantages of this? There are two main advantages. One is that it allows developers to write smart contracts in any programming language they like, which makes it possible for more programmers to enter the field of Layer2 programming or blockchain programming. Those who want to write smart contracts in Rust, C++, or any other language with a standard compiler toolchain can now write smart contracts and run them as real smart contracts on the Arbitrum chain. This is exciting in itself.

Another exciting aspect is that, because the core of the Nitro stack is this WebAssembly execution engine, Stylus contracts should run more efficiently than EVM contracts. We have done a lot of work to speed up the execution of EVM contracts, but Stylus contracts will be another huge improvement, which means you can complete the same calculations with less gas, or complete more calculations with the same amount of gas.

BlockBeats: Will Stylus be a separate new chain?

Ed: Stylus is not a new independent chain, it is something for developers to use, and users can interact with the Stylus chain. This is a single chain. Everything can work seamlessly together, this is "EVM+".

We are working hard to prepare Stylus, and when it has gained some experience on the testnet and undergone a complete security review, Stylus will be made available to the Arbitrum DAO, which can choose to deploy it on the mainnet Arbitrum One. This is the decision of the DAO, and I believe the DAO will support it. Of course, anyone else who launches an L3 chain using Arbitrum Orbit will also have access to this technology.

BlockBeats: In your opinion, can "EVM+" or "Enhanced EVM" become the new mainstream narrative for Ethereum's future scalability?

Ed: I hope so, and I believe this is the right approach. EVM has brought many benefits. The EVM model provides a secure and consistent way for contracts to interact with each other, making the idea of EVM as an international language for communication between different types of contracts very important. I believe that EVM will become the standard in this regard, but I also think that there is a lot of room for innovation in creating new smart contracts and creating Layer3.

We hope to open up all these innovations, but in a way that adds to the EVM rather than reducing it. That's why we call it "EVM+", because we believe it adds functionality to the EVM rather than taking away the benefits of the EVM. For me, this approach is very meaningful as a way to continue developing technology. I hope other ecosystems will adopt similar methods, but obviously it depends on whether they choose to go down this path.

BlockBeats: Thank you very much for your time. Before we finish, is there anything else you would like to add, Ed?

Ed: First of all, thank you very much for the interview with BlockBeats. It is very important to have open communication between the team and the community. I also want to emphasize that the Chinese Arbitrum community is very important to us. We know that we have many friends, users, and developers in the Chinese community, which is very important to us. We appreciate everything you have done and hope to establish deeper and more meaningful relationships with the Chinese community in the future.

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