Ed Felten, Offchain Labs Co-founder Behind Arbitrum, Says New Tool Enhances EVM Safety for Veteran Developers.
Ed Felten, co-founder of Offchain Labs, believes that a recently released tool for Arbitrum developers could attract more developers to Ethereum Virtual Machines (EVM) and enhance its code.
In an interview during Korea Blockchain Week, Felten praised Arbitrum Stylus, which Offchain released on a testnet on August 31, allowing developers to create Arbitrum applications using languages such as Rust, C, and C++.
Felten stated that Stylus would enable non-native Web3 developers to “use the languages and the development tools that they’re used to.”
Today is Arbitrum Day
Last year we took one giant leap with the launch of Arbitrum Nitro.
Today we’re excited to announce that we are taking another big leap with the release of the code and public testnet for Arbitrum Stylus. 🖊👇https://t.co/NaxOuir5WH
— Offchain Labs (@OffchainLabs) August 31, 2023He added that it would attract “a lot more developers” to creating EVMs with more mature tools, citing the more significant number of developers who program in Rust instead of Solidity, the programming language for constructing Ethereum smart contracts.
“One of the things that comes from those much more mature tools is it’s much faster. So it’s 10 to 15 times faster for typical computations than EVM.”
According to Felten, the advantage of supporting legacy languages is the quantity of code already written in languages like Rust that has been “battle-tested and audited.”
Felten identified Rust as a language designed to help catch development errors with tools that are “really good at reducing the likelihood that you’ll introduce a bug in your code.”
“You can just use it. Now you can use that directly on-chain. You’re gonna build less from scratch and you’re gonna be able to take better advantage of things that other people have done.”
Felten also emphasized that the gas cost was 10 to 15 times lower, which allows for “more complex stuff [to be] done in the same transaction” and opens up the possibility of being able to perform iPhone-compatible cryptography.
Felten explained that iPhones use a separate digital signature standard from Ethereum, which is not well supported, so “cryptography on Ethereum that’s compatible with the iPhone has an extremely high gas cost.”
“But in Stylus, you can drive that down so it becomes really feasible. It’s not prohibitively expensive.”
This could pave the way for integrating a crypto wallet on an iPhone, enabling the ability to use FaceID to verify wallet transactions similar to credit card purchases.
For other applications, Felten observed that the lower gas fees led to more realistic blockchain-based gaming and the evaluation of machine learning models using live application data on the blockchain.
Ultimately, Felten believed that Stylus could expedite the delivery of burgeoning projects by using mature programming languages that are better protected against flaws and errors and offer enhanced performance.
“You don’t have to squeeze out every last tiny bit of performance in your code and that also reduces a lot of friction for developing protocols.”