Top L2 Arbitrum’s Scaling Roadmap Seeks to Avoid ‘Trade-offs’

Arbitrum has posted a scaling roadmap that argues that there shouldn’t be a trade-off between performance, unification and decentralization.

The leading Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) noted in a blog post on May 13 that scaling is about performance, with faster speeds, higher throughput and lower costs. But by themselves, these are not enough, Arbitrum said. Instead the goal is to build sustainable and open infrastructure able to stand the test of time.

“Real scaling isn’t about choosing between performance, unification, and decentralization,” Steven Goldfeder, cofounder and CEO of Arbitrum developer Offchain Labs, told The Defiant, adding:

Arbitrum is the No. 2 Ethereum L2 by total value locked (TVL) and the No. 8 chain overall with just under $3 billion, according to DeFiLlama.

The three pillars of scaling

On the performance side, Arbitrum’s long-term goal is to increase the throughput of Arbitrum dApps by 100x, the blog post states.

“It won’t be a singular event but a series of compounding progressions that get us there,” Goldfeder said.

As for unification, he pointed out that there are more than 100 teams building chains in the Arbitrum ecosystem, with dozens already deployed in production. While that, he is convinced, is “the best approach to scaling without compromise, we do need to build interop technology that presents an intuitive and unified interface for users.”

That’s because the goal is not just to unite the Arbitrum ecosystem, but to give users the best possible experience and support.

“So whether they want to transact across two chains in the Arbitrum ecosystem or between Arbitrum and another ecosystem, our goal is to make this as easy and frictionless as possible,” Goldfeder said.

Then there is decentralization, which is a core principle of blockchain technology.

“Arbitrum pushing real scalability without compromising on decentralization is exactly what the ecosystem needs,” Kronos Research analyst Dominick John told The Defiant. “For users, it means cheaper, faster access to DeFi and gaming. For builders, it’s a flexible, high-throughput platform. For Ethereum, it’s a meaningful step forward.”

There are risks, he warned, such as sequencer centralization, referring to the operators responsible for organizing and ordering transactions in L2 networks. Others are competition and complexity for future upgrades.

These, John warned, “will test the roadmap.”

Last week, Arbitrum’s gaming-focused fund announced its first cohort of projects, which will receive a total of $10 million in funding. The initiative, designed to support the development of games on Artbitrum, was first launched last year and was met with pushback from members of the DAO.