• The Arbitrum Foundation has introduced its Layer-2 Network Orbit on the Ethereum mainnet, marking a significant step in the decentralization of Arbitrum.
• Additionally, the foundation has selected Celestia as a modular data availability solution for Orbit, enhancing data handling capabilities.

In an announcement on Thursday, October 26, the Arbitrum Foundation announced the launch of its Layer-2 Network Orbit on the mainnet. The Arbitrum Network has been dedicated to the decentralization of Arbitrum, the biggest Layer-2 network built atop the Ethereum blockchain.

The Arbitrum Foundation has announced that the “Orbit” program, which creates new “layer-3” networks, can now achieve settlements on the Arbitrum main network.

The Orbit program, initiated earlier this year, provides blockchain developers with the capability to establish their own layer-2 or layer-3 networks, utilizing Arbitrum’s technology. Until now, these new layer-3 networks were only able to settle on an Arbitrum test network.

This program was one of the first initiatives introduced when the foundation was established in March, aiming to decentralize Arbitrum. In June, Offchain Labs, the primary developer behind Arbitrum, unveiled Orbit documentation for developer-specific networks, referred to as “devnets.”

According to Offchain Labs, Orbit empowers developers to “create your own dedicated chain that settles to one of Arbitrum’s layer 2 or L2 chains,” including Arbitrum One, Arbitrum Nova, Arbitrum Goerli, and Arbitrum Sepolia. Some projects, like Syndr, had previously disclosed their choice of Arbitrum’s Orbit network for development, initially settling on Arbitrum’s Goerli testnet.

Back in September, the Arbitrum Foundation’s treasury also experienced a notable increase of $59 million, attributed to unclaimed ARB tokens from a March airdrop, redirected to the treasury after the claim deadline expired.

Boosting the Adoption of Arbitrum Technology

This development aligns with the trend among major Ethereum layer-2 network developers, which includes not only Arbitrum but also OP Labs (behind Optimism), Polygon, and Matter Labs (behind zkSync), to open up their technology for developers to replicate or adapt for their specific requirements.

The concept behind this is that these projects can gain benefits, licensing opportunities, or additional revenue by providing a blueprint or foundational infrastructure for creating more networks, which ideally should be interoperable or at least compatible.

According to Steven Goldfeder, in a direct message to CoinDesk,

Today’s announcement of Arbitrum Orbit’s mainnet readiness as well as the initial cohort of 10 Orbit chains marks a significant milestone in the continued expansion of Arbitrum technology.

In a separate update, the Arbitrum Foundation revealed that it has chosen Celestia as a modular solution for Orbit to serve as the data availability layer. Once this solution becomes operational, applications built on Orbit will have the option to publish their data to Celestia.

Celestia represents a modular consensus and data network designed to facilitate secure scalability in tandem with user volume. It aims to become the initial modular Data Availability (DA) solution for Ethereum developers, employing Data Availability Sampling (DAS) to optimize data throughput and meet the demands of millions of rollups while upholding end-user security.

Ethereum and Arbitrum developers can harness Celestia’s capabilities through Blobstream, which is currently relaying data to the Ethereum Sepolia testnet for seamless integration with prominent rollup frameworks. Additionally, Blobstream is adaptable for deployment on Arbitrum Layer-2 solutions, enabling integration with Arbitrum Orbit and the Nitro technology stack.

Arbitrum’s native token ARB has also been following the crypto market rally and showing moves along with Bitcoin.