AN ANALOGY OF ARBITRUM ONE VS ARBITRUM NOVA

Daniel Christopher
3 min readNov 11, 2023

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DID YOU KNOW?

As part of Arbitrum’s efforts and commitment to revolutionize Blockchain Technology, Arbitrum’s framework has been designed to achieve these goals by increasing scalability, ensuring security of assets, and reducing transaction costs, these are basic characteristics of Arbitrum Layer 2 chains, which are built on the Ethereum Blockchain.

Primarily, Arbitrum boasts of 2 efficient Production chains as highlighted below;

  • Arbitrum One
  • Arbitrum Nova

Arbitrum One:

Implementing the Arbitrum Rollup protocol, Arbitrum One is a Layer 2 (L2) optimistic rollup chain that settles to Ethereum’s Layer 1 (L1) chain. Without requiring any new trust assumptions, it enables you to create high-performance Ethereum dApps with cheap transaction costs and Ethereum-grade security guarantees. Arbitrum One makes use of the Nitro technology stack, a "Geth-at-the-core" design that provides improved calldata compression, distinct contexts for fault proving and shared execution, Ethereum L1 gas compatibility, this also extends to make other unique features of Arbitrum possible.
Arbitrum One is mostly used for DeFi and NFTs. It is important to highlight that Arbitrum One has been recognized as the most advanced, decentralized, and secure Layer 2 (L2) chain in the ecosystem by L2Beat, an organization that analyzes each L2 technology in the market. This recognition further solidifies Arbitrum One’s position as a leading L2 solution in the blockchain industry, cementing its role in revolutionizing the scalability, security, and affordability of smart contract execution.

Arbitrum Nova:

Another scalability solution from Arbitrum is Arbitrum Nova. Arbitrum Nova employs the AnyTrust protocol, which is primarily trustless, whereas Arbitrum One implements the totally trustless Rollup protocol. The main distinction between AnyTrust and Rollup is that the latter protocol adds a data availability committee (DAC) as an extra trust assumption. The speeding up of the process of storing, batching, and uploading L2 transaction data to Ethereum’s L1 is the responsibility of this committee, which is described below. This enables you to use Arbitrum in situations where affordability and performance are required, whereas Ethereum’s complete trustlessness is best suited for Arbitrum One.
Arbitrum Nova is mostly used for Gaming and Social dApps.

Difference between Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova:

The primary distinctions among the Arbitrum chains are found in their functions and the settings in which they function.

Production chains called Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova are intended for practical use. They manage genuine, important transactions and are linked to the Ethereum mainnet. Under the hood, they are both powered by Arbitrum's Nitro technology stack; however, Arbitrum One uses the Rollup protocol and Nova uses the AnyTrust protocol. With its universal design, Arbitrum One offers an affordable and scalable way to execute smart contracts that are compatible with Ethereum. However, Arbitrum Nova is intended for use with applications that need a higher throughput of transactions but do not require the complete decentralization that rollups offer.

Arbitrum is a suite of scaling solutions providing environments with high-throughout, low-cost smart contracts, backed by industry-leading proven technology rooted in Ethereum. Arbitrum has primarily 2 blockchains called Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova. The newest product Arbitrum Orbit, let's you create your own dedicated chain that settles to one of Arbitrum's Layer 2(L2) chains. Arbitrum One, Arbitrum Nova, or Arbitrum Goerli. Learn more about Arbitrum here

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Daniel Christopher
Daniel Christopher

Written by Daniel Christopher

Exclusive Content Creator, Digital and Crypto enthusiast, Graphics/Infographics Designer, MEME expert.