Arbitrum Announces the Launch of Nova, a Chain for Games and Social Projects

Offchain Labs, the developer of the Ethereum scaling solution Arbitrum, today announced the launch of a new blockchain named Nova for all end-users and developers. Arbitrum Nova, the second chain launched in the Arbitrum ecosystem, is designed to serve as the premier solution for Web3 gaming and social applications.

Nova is the second chain launched in the ecosystem alongside Arbitrum One, which was designed to support scaling decentralized finance and non fungible tokens. When combined with Arbitrum One, it now features two chains running live on mainnet that together offers an ideal solution for all blockchain use cases.

Launch of Arbitrum Nova with AnyTrust Technology

Arbitrum Nova is an entirely new chain built on Arbitrum’s AnyTrust technology, which is optimized for ultra-low-cost transactions with strong security guarantees. Nova takes a novel technical approach with the use of a data availability committee. Rather than posting all data to the Ethereum network, the committee certifies and validates batches of transactions and only posts the certifications to Ethereum, resulting in significant cost savings for users.

Speaking to in an interview, Steven Goldfeder, co-founder and chief executive of Offchain Labs, said Arbitrum One already brings Ethereum transactions for decentralized apps down about 97% with high security. It uses “zero-knowledge rollups” that bundle transactions off-chain before submitting them in batches. That allows them to execute faster and with lower fees.

Compared to other low-cost blockchain solutions, Nova is built on the AnyTrust technology which delivers much stronger security guarantees.

“The launch of Arbitrum Nova marks a major milestone for the Arbitrum ecosystem,” said Steven. “The high scalability and ultra-low-cost transaction fees of Arbitrum Nova open developers to a new world of possibilities when building on Ethereum. We look forward to continually optimizing and improving Nova to drive costs down even further.”

Why AnyTrust technology?

However, Goldfeder explained, certain other applications that need to do more transactions would find that extremely burdensome, so the team designed a different technology to launch Arbitrum Nova.

“There is another class of projects which have a high volume of transactions and massive user bases and aren’t necessarily blockchain-native and thus don’t have the appetite to pay these kinds of fees,” he said. “Two of these types of projects are games and social applications. They look and they say that they want to launch on Arbitrum, but they need an ultra-low fee.”

Nova is built on a technology known as AnyTrust, which allows for ultra-low-cost transactions, even lower than Arbitrum One, and it still delivers high security, speed and scalability for transactions. It does so by certifying and validating the transaction batches, and posting only the certifications, not all the data, to the Ethereum blockchain. The end result is significant cost savings.

Nova an Ideal Chain for Games and Social Media

Nova is the ideal chain for projects with cost-sensitive and high transaction volume expectations, including games that frequently mint new items and currency, or social projects with different levers for on-chain interactions.

Games tend to mint new items and currency consistently and players constantly trade between one another, high fees would stifle in-game economies. Social media apps rely on scaling messaging between users and high fees would quickly quash the ability to communicate freely.

Most notably, in coordination with Nova’s launch, Reddit will be launching Community Points by building upon Arbitrum Nova. Nova is designed with the needs of developers in mind and allows projects to scale with ease due to lower transaction costs.

The launch comes four weeks after Arbitrum Nova was deployed onto the Arbitrum mainnet through a Fair Launch, providing developers with sufficient time to deploy their applications onto the chain. In addition to Reddit, several other companies are planning to support the Arbitrum Nova launch including cryptocurrency exchange FTX, MetaMask developer Consensys and blockchain infrastructure startup QuickNode, all of which will be inaugural members of Nova’s Data Availability Committee.