ConsenSys’ Infrastructure Product, Infura, Joins the Data Availability Committee for Arbitrum Nova, Offchain Labs’ New Network

ConsenSys is proud to announce a partnership with Offchain Labs. ConsenSys product, Infura, will join the Data Availability Committee (“DAC”) for Offchain Labs’ new chain, Arbitrum Nova, as part of the pioneering cohort. The purpose of the committee is to provide access to on-chain data and validate transactions to support scalable and secure blockchain innovation. Infura will be part of the committee, comprised of leading players from Web2 and Web3 including Offchain Labs, Reddit, Google Cloud, FTX, P2P, and QuickNode.

The selection of Infura to this DAC demonstrates our long-standing role as a leading and trusted provider of high-availability infrastructure and reliable access to blockchain data.

We look forward to being part of Arbitrum Nova’s DAC as it gives ConsenSys the opportunity to support yet another blockchain initiative - one which emerged from a grassroots level to solve the most difficult and pressing scalability issues that we face as a community. The development that Infura will pioneer together with the rest of the committee will evolve blockchain data access and secure transactions to ensure a sustainable future for the entire Web3 ecosystem.

What is Arbitrum Nova?

Arbitrum Nova, Arbitrum’s second chain after Arbitrum One, was launched today for all end-users and developers. Nova’s high-speed, low-cost transactions, and architecture are designed for Web3 gaming and social applications, and is powered by Arbitrum’s AnyTrust technology.

The Arbitrum Nova chain works through its sequencer that takes transaction data and makes it publicly available for any developer to fetch. The sequencer passes this data to the DAC, where each member will check the validity of the transaction data before signing a Data Availability Certificate ("DA Certificate") to attest that the data is correct and publicly available.

All DA Certificates are then submitted to the smart contract and stored on-chain. This convinces the on-chain contract that any honest party can fetch the transaction data, the former which is essential to protecting funds held by the system.

Since only these DA Certificates are posted to Layer 1, on-chain storage requirements are much lower, lowering this major cost component.

The benefits of building with Arbitrum Nova

Now that you know what Abritrum Nova is, how it works, and how Infura is playing a major role in supporting it, let’s break down the benefits of building with this new chain.

• Supports cost-sensitive projects with high transaction volumes.
• Lower transaction fees than even Arbitrum One due to the work of the DAC.
• Stronger levels of security.
  

To understand the benefits of building with Arbitrum Nova, it is also important to understand how the DAC works.

How the DAC works

The committee will work by assuming at least two honest members to protect the funds and by having six members on the DAC to increase the level of difficulty to compromise the validation consensus, Arbitrum Nova users will benefit from a highly secure system, because no one member will be a single point of failure.

If DAC members are offline or not cooperating such that a minimum quorum for signing DAC Certificates cannot be achieved, this system will revert to the original Arbitrum rollup protocol and continue operating at the cost of an Ethereum-based rollup, until a quorum is restored.

In other words, if any one of the DAC members is hacked, funds cannot be stolen and the system will continue to operate.

Next steps

Arbitrum Nova will start by operating two long-standing protocols’ tokens, MakerDAO’s DAI and SushiSwap’s SUSHI, as well as Reddit’s social token project, Community Points.

ConsenSys is excited about Infura’s role on the DAC, not only because we’re helping such impactful projects to scale, but because this is the latest addition of contributions that ConsenSys is making to drive the growth, diversity, and adoption of Web3.

In addition to being the leading blockchain development platform, by providing high-quality data to over 400K developers, Infura has been part of StarkWare’s StarkEx data availability committee since 2020 and recently became an official node operator on the Chainlink network. ConsenSys believes that Web3 must be multi-chain and Infura’s role in Arbitrum Nova’s DAC underpins our belief and support to create this future.

Curious about Arbitrum? Register for a free Infura account and try Arbitrum One, today.

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About Offchain Labs

Offchain Labs is a venture-backed and Princeton-founded company that is developing Arbitrum, a suite of scaling technologies for Ethereum. Arbitrum is the leading scaling provider for Ethereum and  has two live chains -- Arbitrum One, the scaling solution of choice for DeFi and NFTs and Arbitrum Nova, the newly announced gaming and social platform. Arbitrum's technology instantly scales apps, reducing costs and increasing capacity, without sacrificing Ethereum's security. Porting contracts to Arbitrum requires no code changes or downloads as Arbitrum is fully compatible with most existing Ethereum developer tooling. Hundreds of teams have already chosen to build in the Arbitrum ecosystem.