It’s time for a new dawn, Nova is open to the public!
Tl;dr — Nova is now open to the public! Reddit is launching their community points system on Nova. Bridge to Nova here! Learn more about Nova! Get started Building on Nova here!
Arbinauts assemble! The gates of Arbitrum Nova are now open!
Yes, you read that correctly — as of today we’ve dropped the developer whitelist for Nova, our newest chain that’s optimized for gaming and social applications, and are now welcoming users and more builders to bridge and start developing on our first AnyTrust chain. You can bridge to Nova here, and learn more about Nova by visiting our site.
Back in our original announcement post we shared our belief that Nova is perfectly suited for gaming and social projects — projects with very high transaction volumes that seek to drive costs even lower, but still want high security. Over the last couple of weeks we’ve seen a lot of interest and traction with teams across the ecosystem deploying as part of our fair launch process, and we granted access to over 100 development teams.
We couldn’t be more excited to share that today, alongside the public launch of our chain, Reddit is deploying their Community Points system to Nova, starting with two communities, and you can read more about their journey here. Reddit’s journey, from bakeoff to mainnet deployment, underscores our belief that the Arbitrum technical stack is the best scaling solution for developers, not just in Ethereum, but in the entire blockchain space.
This has been, and will continue to be, a big month for the Arbitrum community. Last week we announced our mainnet migration plans for bringing Arbitrum One to Nitro, set for August 31st. Today we opened a brand new chain to the public that will be the home of Reddit’s Community Points system, a new paradigm in bringing social communities on-chain. We’ve got a bit more to share about Nova, including our Data Availability Committee members, and the best way to get started building, but with all that said…
Welcome to Arbitrum August!
Inaugural Data Availability Committee
We’ve mentioned that Nova provides projects with ultra-low transaction costs and uses a Data Availability Committee. Today we wanted to share the inaugural members of the committee!
Some of the best teams in the industry came together to form the initial committee, including:
- Consensys
- Google Cloud
- Offchain Labs
- P2P
- Quicknode
We’re excited to work with these teams because they are organizations that have shipped resilient tech that impacts a large user base, something that we are looking to achieve with Nova, and because they believe in the vision of web3. Over time the committee will grow and we’re looking forward to sharing more details with the community as things progress.
Getting Started with Nova
So you want to build on Nova? Glad you’re interested and ready to go. You can learn more about how Nova works here, but here’s a quick guide to get started.
- First, you can bridge over to Nova using the Arbitrum bridge, which now supports easy network switching between Arbitrum Nova and Arbitrum One! We hope this will make moving between Ethereum mainnet and our chains simpler and easier to navigate.
- Next, if you want to deploy on testnet beforehand we strongly recommend using Arbitrum Goerli, as that will be our long-term testnet going forward. Other than transaction fee amounts, the development experience between Goerli and Nova will be exactly the same, as both are built on Nitro!
- Finally, deploying on Nova is as simple as configuring your rpc endpoint and ChainID to the nova chain, nova.arbitrum.io/rpc and 42170 respectively — you can find those and more chain details here. For newer devs, you can get started with our tutorials, and join our discord where a lot of Arbitrum developers regularly help each other.
Additionally, if you’re deployed on Arbitrum One, and want to bring your project to Arbitrum Nova as well, remember that Nova is already built on the Nitro stack and to carefully review our dapp migration notes while deploying to ensure your smart contracts are updated to work with Nitro.
Our documentation should serve as a great resource for teams, as other than the migration notes for Nitro mentioned above, and the chain-specific configuration (RPC and ID), deploying to Nova follows all of our existing documentation.
What you can already do on Nova
So you want to use Nova? Amazing. As we mentioned earlier, Reddit is in the process of launching their community points system on Nova, currently in two communities (a.k.a. subreddits).
We also have a few other projects live on the chain today, including Sushi and several others. FTX is also supporting direct on-boarding onto the chain and many, many more projects are in the pipeline.
For users who want to bridge over to Nova, you can use our bridge directly at bridge.arbitrum.io, and if your wallet needs additional configuration, our rpc and chainid details can be found here.
Arbitrum August will lead into Arbitrum Autumn
*whew* So it’s been a hefty month so far, with a lot to look forward to. We successfully migrated Arbitrum Rinkeby to Nitro, announced plans to migrate Arbitrum One to Nitro on August 31, and today, launched Arbitrum Nova to the public.
Building Arbitrum continues to be an exciting, challenging, and humbling experience — and we couldn’t do it without the support of our community of Arbiters — we really mean that. From providing feedback, helping to onboard new users and projects, and generally being the positive community we know and love.
Arbitrum August is shaping up to be an incredible month. We’ve got a lot more in store and can’t wait to share it with all of you as Arbitrum August becomes Arbitrum Autumn. We’re going to get back to shipping the best scaling solution for blockchain devs, and if you’d like to be part of the team shipping the technology behind Arbitrum, head over to our careers page and apply!
