Arbitrum Launches Arbitrum Nova

• Offchain Labs launches Arbitrum Nova.

• Curve Finance suffers a DNS hijack.

• Reddit launches Community Points on Arbitrum Nova.

• Pinata raises an $18 million Series A funding round.

Offchain Labs announced the public release of Arbitrum Nova, a new L2 chain built on the company’s AnyTrust technology optimized for gaming and social applications. Arbitrum Nova offers ultra-low-cost transactions by placing data availability off-chain. Fees on the network are currently less than 1 cent per transaction. Sequencers on the network batch and compress transactions. A Data Availability Committee (DAC) then provides a certificate of data availability which is posted to Mainnet Ethereum. If a data availability certificate can't be generated, the network falls back to Arbitrum Rollup and posts compressed calldata to Ethereum. Consensys, FTX, Google Cloud, P2P, Quicknode, and Reddit were selected as the inaugural Data Availability Committee members. Arbitrum Nova uses its own RPC on chain ID 42170. Anyone can now use bridge.arbitrum.io to bridge tokens to the network. Sushi and Maker are among the first dapps to deploy on Arbitrum Nova.

Offchain Labs also revealed that Reddit will be migrating its community points program to Arbitrum Nova. Arbitrum was selected as the winner for Reddit’s “Great Reddit Scaling Bake-off” competition back in 2021. The competition aimed to champion a developer that could deploy a scalable solution for community points on Ethereum. Reddit is initially deploying the community points system to Nova on the r/CryptoCurrency and r/FortnightBR subreddits. Reddit Points are ERC-20 tokens on Arbitrum Nova which are earned by users for engaging in subreddit communities. Points can be used for voting, tipping, and purchasing memberships. Once points are spent, they are burned and removed from circulation. FTX also partnered with Reddit to provide a fiat on-ramp integration via FTX Pay. Users that earn Reddit Points will still need ETH to be able to claim airdrops, purchase memberships, and make transactions.

Curve Finance suffered a DNS attack on the front end of its curve.fi website. An attacker hijacked Curve’s nameservers and spoofed the curve.fi domain to point to the hacker’s IP. The DNS then directed users to the hacker’s IP, which contained a cloned site that requested approvals to a malicious contract. More than $540k worth of assets were stolen, which the attacker laundered through Tornado Cash. Anyone who used Curve during the hijack is urgently advised to revoke approvals for the malicious contract. Curve later reported the attack was likely due to a compromise at its nameserver provider iwantmyname.com. The name server issue has since been found and reverted.

IPFS storage platform Pinata Cloud has raised $18 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Pantera and Greylock with participation from Volt Capital, OpenSea and Alchemy. Pinata Cloud allows users to upload, store, and pin content on IPFS. Pinata is focused on serving NFT projects, creators, metaverses, and dapps at scale. The platform also supports dedicated gateways, IPFS image resizing, and private IPFS file uploads through its submarine product. Pinata plans to use the fresh round of capital to continue improving the speed, security, and efficiency of its technology infrastructure. Pinata has served more than 240k users to date since launching in 2018.

Argent has integrated Orbiter Finance into its Argent X wallet. Users can bridge ETH from Orbiter’s 11 chains from Starknet, directly within the Argent X browser wallet. StarkNet is an L2 network by StarkWare with over 200k users on its mainnet alpha release. Orbiter Finance is a decentralized cross-rollup bridge and the first third-party bridge to support bridging to and from StarkNet.