Offchain Labs has released Arbitrum Stylus, a new technical implementation that allows developers to build smart contracts using programming languages compatible with the WebAssembly industry standard format, also known as WASM. This offering, now available for use on a test network, means developers can program with popular coding languages like Rust, C, and C++ alongside languages that are compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) standard.
That’s like orders of magnitude more developers using these more traditional programming languages that teams and companies are much more familiar with, said Rachel Bousfield, tech lead at Offchain. If you’re outside of this space, and you’re thinking about, ‘How do I bring my video game that’s written in C++ to the blockchain?’ being able to use the tooling you already know, and have processes for, and have all this talent already hired at your company for, it’s a huge decrease in friction.
The Arbitrum DAO members will vote on whether to deploy the tool to the main Arbitrum network. Offchain CEO Steven Goldfeder said, I think certainly by the end of the year, we expect it to be in a position where the DAO could vote on it and likely will vote on it. But ultimately, it’s in the hands of the community.
Offchain Labs is pushing to draw in a wider swath of coders to the nascent and still technically daunting crypto industry. Arbitrum Stylus is their way of targeting new developers to bring over their projects and build on Arbitrum’s Nitro stack, while also maintaining compatibility with the wider Ethereum ecosystem.