🎙️Offchain Labs' A.J. Warner on Making Arbitrum the Leading Layer 2 Scaling Solution for Ethereum

This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak with A.J. Warner, the Chief Strategy Officer at Offchain Labs, the builders of Arbitrum, one of the leading scaling solutions for Ethereum using Optimistic Rollups. We also welcome Tegan Kline, the co-founder of Edge Node, the initial team behind The Graph. 

The Defiant’s Camila Russo and Tegan are co-hosting the podcast for the first time. Going forward, they will record shows together, and Tegan will also have her own Defiant podcast episodes.

Scaling is now a hot topic on Ethereum and throughout the blockchain ecosystem, as all of our listeners are likely aware. According to L2Beat, Arbitrum has nearly $2.7B in total value locked. AJ goes on to explain the dApps and protocols building on Arbitrum and how they’ve managed to make Arbitrum the leading destination among Layer 2s.

Arbitrum is one of the few scaling solutions that doesn't nod to the underlying technology it uses in its name. As AJ mentioned, their goal is to scale Ethereum without being a proponent of any scaling technology. Does this mean Arbitrum will have a zero-knowledge (ZK) component in the future?

Finally, we discuss the growing rivalries in a Layer 2 space that’s getting more crowded and whether there’s any noticeable hostility between competitors.

🎙Listen to the interview in this week’s podcast episode here:

📺 Watch the video here:

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🙏 Thanking our podcast sponsors:

• This episode is brought to you by Circle, the sole issuer of USDC, and a leader in crypto that’s held to a higher standard. Learn more at https://www.circle.com/en/usdc

• Aave Grants is a community-led grants program, focused on growing a thriving ecosystem of contributors within Aave by funding ideas, projects and events that benefit the protocol or surrounding ecosystem. Head to aavegrants.org to learn more and apply for a grant.

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What follows is a summary of the podcast episode. Please let us know if you like this new format.

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An Intro To Optimistic rollups, Offchain Labs, and the difference between Offchain Labs and Arbitrum.

• Offchain Labs is the development arm, the company that's building the technology. 

• Arbitrum is the underlying technology stack. We call Arbitrum the Optimistic roll-up solution that we've designed. So it's really the distinction between the company that is building and developing this protocol and stewarding the growth of the protocol.

• By design, Ethereum's base layer, which we call Ethereum Layer 1, does not scale. And the reason for this is that the more throughput you have, the harder it would be to keep things secure and decentralized because it would be harder for people to run nodes at home.

Vitalik's roll-up-centric plan for Ethereum is to have Layer 2 technologies, and rollup technologies that live on top of Ethereum and tell Ethereum, "We're going to depend on you for decentralization and security, but we're going to build other environments that live on top of you for execution."