Arbitrum To Launch Nitro Upgrade on August 31

Arbitrum, a Layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum, has recently announced that the migration to Nitro is set to take place on August 31 at 10:30 AM ET. Being an upgraded version of Arbitrum One, Nitro is expected to bring faster transactions and lower fees.

According to Offchain Labs, the company behind Arbitrum, the root of the new iteration of the network is a new prover, which can do Arbitrum’s classic interactive fraud proofs over WebAssembly (WASM) code. That means the L2 Arbitrum engine can run on WASM, replacing the custom-designed AVM architecture used today. As a result, the system can be built and compiled using standard languages and tooling, replacing the custom-designed language and compiler which are currently in use.

On top of that, Arbitrum will replace its current custom-built EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) emulator with Geth, the most popular and well-supported Ethereum client. It will boost EVM compatibility of the network, potentially leading to a 20–50x increase in Layer 2 execution speed.

With Nitro around the corner, Arbitrum Odyssey is expected to resume in the following weeks. The event was abruptly paused just a week after its launch on June 21 due to network congestion that caused abnormally high fees.

“Like Ethereum, when traffic hits capacity the L2 gas price increases automatically until the traffic surge slows down. As a result of the frenzy during last week’s Arbitrum Odyssey Campaign, many users were priced out,” the official announcement explained the decision to pause Odyssey.

Odyssey is a multi-week event intended to invite users to explore different parts of the Arbitrum ecosystem. The participants are rewarded with exclusive NFTs for completing basic quests on the network’s DApps. Moreover, there are persistent rumors about Arbitrum’s plan to launch airdrop after Odyssey, following the suit of Optimism, another L2 protocol that recently distributed its OP tokens among the most active users.

Of course, there’s been no official confirmation of the airdrop from Arbitrum devs, but such a move would make perfect sense since most active participants can be easily identified through NFTs in their wallets.

The general idea of Odyssey is that every week users complete tasks and then claim NFTs, which, in theory, count towards the airdrop eligibility. Since the event was paused just a week after the start, there’s still a chance to participate without missing too much of it. And by the way, the very first NFT “Enter the Odyssey” from week one is still claimable!

The anonymous DeFi educator olimpio.lens detailed in a Twitter thread how to increase the chances of receiving the airdrop. Besides the Odyssey, there’s also a series of quests from Arbitrum Guild that would boost your on-chain activity. To participate, you only have to connect your wallet and discord and start doing the quests.

As olimpio.lens pointed out, it may be useful to analyze what was Optimism criteria for airdrop eligibility since it can provide important insights on what kinds of on-chain activity are valued the most. Also, keep in mind that creating many addresses to hunt the airdrop will most likely get you disqualified from the start. The so-called Sybil wallets are easily identifiable since they often do the bare minimum, don’t hold assets from other networks, and have little to no transaction history. Optimism, for instance, identified and removed more than 17,000 alleged Sybil accounts, redistributing recovered tokens proportionally to other legitimate users.

“Optimism is for the people, not the sybils,” the Foundation said. Don’t be a Sybil – instead, you should be genuinely willing to explore the opportunities offered by Arbitrum.