Since its inception, the DeFi ecosystem has primarily been hosted on Ethereum (ETH). However, faced with rising fees, some projects are making the choice to deploy versions of their protocol on less costly blockchains.
Arbitrum comes to lend a hand to Ethereum
Ethereum has been suffering from its lack of scalability for several months. The rise of DeFi and NFT ecosystems has led to a surge in transaction fees. Initially, many protocols have chosen to migrate to competing chains, such as the Binance Smart Chain, in order to benefit from lower fees.
In parallel, the so-called second layer solutions have also been developed on Ethereum. This is notably the case of Arbitrum, a second-layer solution based on optimistic rollups, deployed on the mainnet at the beginning of September.
Following its launch, the network has experienced a massive craze, seeing its TVL explode. Indeed, the amount of cryptocurrencies deposited through the various protocols hosted on Arbitrum reached $1.81 billion, less than 15 days after its launch. Its TVL has since come back down, mainly due to the fall in the price of Bitcoin and other cryptos.
Unsurprisingly, the main protocols on the Arbitrum network are proving to be the pioneers of DeFi on Ethereum. We find Curve, Sushiswap, Uniswap and Balancer, to name a few.
1inch joins the Arbitrum network
In parallel with the protocols we just mentioned, other protocols are migrating to Arbitrum every day.
In particular, on September 22, we got wind of the porting of a version of the decentralized exchange aggregator 1inch to the second layer solution.
“The benefits of Arbitrum will obviously be attractive to 1inch users, as they benefit from greater transaction diversity and cheaper withdrawal options.”
Anton Bukov, founder of 1inch
At launch, the aggregator will support the following 7 DEX:
- Uniswap;
- Balancer;
- 1inch Limit Order Protocol;
- DODO;
- SushiSwap;
- Swapr;
- WETH.
Obviously, porting 1inch proved to be relatively easy to conduct, knowing that Arbitrum’s environment is able to run the same source code as that executed in Ethereum’s EVM. Furthermore, 1inch is not new to the game, as the platform has already been deployed on BSC and Polygon, in addition to Ethereum.
“Arbitrum is an optimistic rollups solution that supports the same code as Ethereum, so Ethereum developers can easily compile their smart contracts to run on Arbitrum. This ensures full compatibility with Ethereum at the smart contract and web3 interface level.”
1inch announcement
As a result, users of the Arbitrum network will now be able to take advantage of the best in decentralized exchange aggregators, always enjoying the best exchange rate.
It goes without saying that Arbitrum is not the only second-layer solution trying to solve Ethereum’s scalability problems. Indeed, its competitor Optimism also continues to develop, although it does not meet the same success. Despite this, it still manages to attract many protocols to its solution, as is the case of Chainlink, which joined the network in September.
