Podcast conversation: Scaling Ethereum and Web3 using Arbitrum optimistic rollups, with Offchain Labs CEO Steven Goldfeder

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In this conversation, we chat with Steven Goldfeder, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer at Offchain Labs – the team building Arbitrum. He holds a PhD from Princeton University, where he worked at the intersection of cryptography and cryptocurrencies. Before Offchain, he attended Princeton as a PhD candidate, where his research explored economics, anonymity, and incentive compatibility of cryptocurrencies.

More specifically, we geek out on the heydays of early cryptography and the connection to cryptocurrency, zero-knowledge proofs, the fundamental structure of Ethereum and how this birthed Arbitrum, the application of optimistic roll-ups, the existing data storage issues of Layer 1s and how Arbitrum seek to solve them, and so so much more!

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Sneak Peek:

Steven Goldfeder:
…and another example that we're seeing really the early emergings of today, and I think it's going to get a lot stronger, is gaming on the blockchain. If you're playing a game, for game developers, the considerations are often such. Number one, I want there to be a really, really good game. Number two, I want it to be connected to the blockchain. But you want it to appeal to people that are just interested in the game, even if they don't care about the underlying blockchain part.

And if you're on Ethereum and the fees are tens or hundreds of dollars, it doesn't really make sense to build a game. You can't be in the background if your wallet's being drained. But on Arbitrum where the fees are much, much lower, you actually can have meaningful gaming experiences where you can hit the blockchain and users will enjoy this game and their wallets won't be drained. And actually, we can touch on this potentially later, we're building Arbitrum AnyTrust, which is an even lower fee variant of Arbitrum that's optimized towards gaming, towards this high volume of transactions. The idea is you want to build a good experience that has a constant touch to the blockchain, but it constantly touches the blockchain but also doesn't drain users' wallets.

To your second question, how do users get onto the network? There are a few ways. One is…

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