Offchain Labs is the company behind Arbitrum, the largest Ethereum layer-2 network by total value locked. Founded in 2018 by Ed Felten (former White House Deputy CTO), Steven Goldfeder, and Harry Kalodner — all from Princeton University — the company has raised over $120 million from investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Polychain Capital.
Arbitrum uses optimistic rollup technology to scale Ethereum, processing transactions off-chain and posting compressed data back to Ethereum for security. The network launched on mainnet in August 2021 and quickly became the dominant L2 by total value locked, consistently holding over $10 billion in assets at peak periods.
The company operates multiple products under the Arbitrum umbrella. Arbitrum One is the general-purpose rollup for DeFi and dApps. Arbitrum Nova is a separate chain optimized for gaming and social applications with lower costs. Arbitrum Orbit lets third parties launch their own L2 or L3 chains using Arbitrum’s technology stack, similar to Optimism’s OP Stack.
The ARB governance token launched in March 2023 via an airdrop that was one of the largest in crypto history, distributing tokens to hundreds of thousands of wallet addresses. Offchain Labs also developed Stylus, a feature that lets developers write smart contracts in Rust, C, and C++ alongside Solidity, significantly expanding the pool of programmers who can build on Arbitrum. The company has maintained its lead in the L2 space through aggressive technical development and ecosystem partnerships.
