Because the costs on the layer-2 solution were higher than on the Ethereum mainnet, Arbitrum had to halt its NFT-powered rewards campaign.
Crypto’s volatile nature makes it impossible to compare long-term value propositions with short-term incentives.
The clunky nature of crypto-native solutions necessitates consumers to go through a variety of strange hoops to transfer a little amount of money. For this product to gain significant popularity, though, it must allow you to generate more money by moving your money around.
DeFi’s airdrops, yield farms, and so on are wonderful examples of this dynamic. This ambiguous dynamic is also at play in the partnership between layer-2 bridging provider Hop Protocol and ETH scaler Arbitrum.
Before we begin, it’s important to note that Hop is a way to transition between several layer-2 scaling options. From Arbitrum and Optimism, you can transfer money via Hop (and back again). Many of these types of bridges already exist, but you may have to wait a while before you can withdraw your funds.
Bridged Funds Withdrawal Time
Withdrawing bridged funds from Arbitrum may take up to a week.
Both of these products are seeing explosive growth. The gas prices on Arbitrum, for a brief period, were even higher than those on Ethereum’s mainnet.
There has been a significant uptick in Arbitrum’s traffic as a result of their “Enter the Odyssey” marketing campaign.
For two months, the scaling solution’s developers planned to distribute unique NFTs to users who performed specific tasks within the Arbitrum ecosystem. A minute later, we’ll discuss why this anticipation was unmet.
For the first week, starting on June 21st, the goal was to simply transfer assets from a handful of crypto bridges to Arbitrum. In addition, “Users who utilise the bridge that ends up getting the maximum volume at the conclusion of the week will also be able to claim an extra NFT,” as reported by Arbitrum.
Which do you believe triumphed among the roughly twenty bridges on offer?
In other words, Hop Protocol, and it wasn’t even close.
Ethereum’s Arbitrum Delayed Odyssey
Despite positive early evaluations, Arbitrum delayed Odyssey, a well-planned and inclusive campaign, on Thursday.
The team said on Twitter on Wednesday that they would be pausing the Odyssey until Nitro was released since the increased gas costs were preventing “a frictionless experience” for all communities and projects within Arbitrum.
According to the plan, another piece of scaling technology called Nitro will be live soon. In its current implementation, Arbitrum reduces network speeds during peak usage periods. The use of Nitro would be like removing the brakes from a car.
Given that the incentive programme was designed to aid in the scalability of cryptocurrencies, the fact that it has brought Arbitrum to its knees is a terrible sign.
Hop, on the other hand, did exceptionally well, acquiring almost 165,000 new users.
Hop may have been too successful a product for Arbitrum to handle. Users, after all, have their pick of a multitude of alternative bridges available to them.
