During Chainlink’s 2022 SmartCon event, September 28-29 in New York City, Nasdaq TradeTalks’ Jill Malandrino hosted a two-day interview lineup with founders of influential protocols in the Chainlink ecosystem who were among the conference’s 100+ expert speakers.
After her conversation with Synthetix founder Kain Warwick about the future enabled by Synthetix V3 and Chainlink’s CCIP, Malandrino sat down with Ed Felten, co-founder and Chief Scientist at Offchain Labs, to discuss the company’s role in web3 and how it’s building the Arbitrum layer-2 to help scale the Ethereum network.
Felten summed up Arbitrum’s basic value proposition, telling Malandrino, “We’re all about making the Ethereum experience faster and cheaper.” He explained how Arbitrum allows users to interact with their favorite DeFi, NFT, social, and gaming applications with instant response times and a 10x to 20x reduction in fees.
He also shared Arbitrum’s origin story, dating back to 2014 when he was an academic at Princeton University.
“We realized that something like web3 was going to be happening but there was going to be a fundamental challenge with blockchain-based applications about cost and about speed. And so we started working on it even back then,” he said.
Since then, Arbitrum has evolved from an idea to an academic prototype to a project with a flourishing community of users who had a strong presence at SmartCon.
“We’re here at SmartCon because a lot of our community is here and because we have a close connection with Chainlink and the Chainlink community,” Felten said. “Chainlink provides important infrastructure services on our Arbitrum networks.”
Looking holistically at the web3 space, Felten expects to see continued growth in the realm of DeFi and NFTs with “big expansion” on the horizon for decentralized gaming and social applications as the necessary technology matures.
He sees Arbitrum as an essential player driving web3’s evolution.
“We’re about continuing to push the speed, continuing to push the cost down of using secure blockchain applications, and we’re going to just continue to build those things,” he said. “We think that we’re providing a really important piece of infrastructure for the Ethereum community.”
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Ed Felten on Nasdaq TradeTalks.