Offchain Labs has launched the public mainnet of Arbitrum One — the highly anticipated Ethereum layer two platform.
Offchain Labs revealed this on Tuesday, Aug 31, noting that it secured $120 million in a Series B fundraising round.
The launch of this platform comes as crypto enthusiasts have continued to worry about the increased cost of gas fees on the Ethereum mainnet, fueled by the growing popularity and adoption of Non Fungible Tokens.
Data by Etherscan shows average gas prices have exceeded 100 gwei over the past week, with regular token transfers costing more than $7 while transactions using decentralized exchanges exceed $65 on average. By contrast, gas prices were just 15 gwei one year ago.
The funding was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Other investors comprised Polychain Capital, Pantera Capital, Alameda Research, and Mark Cuban.
CoinTelegraph reports that Lightspeed partner Ravi Mhatre also joined Offchain Labs’ board as part of the round.
“Offchain Labs’ dedication to the Ethereum developer community is second to none and they have the best, easiest-to-use scalability product. That’s why over 400 projects have chosen to launch with Arbitrum, including Reddit,” Amy Wu, also a partner at Lightspeed, stated.
In May, Offchain Labs, completed its beta launch of Arbitrum One for developers, allowing developers to begin building on the platform.
Aave, MakerDAO, Chainlink, and Uniswap are popular DeFi protocols that have begun building on Arbitrum one.
Reddit, in July, also announced it will launch its own layer-two rollup based on Arbitrum’s technology.
Just as more scalable solutions are being proffered for the Ethereum blockchain, it is expected that more firms will join in rolling out this technology.
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