Arbitrum Stylus Mainnet Launches: Introduces WASM VM Enabling Smart Contracts in Rust, C, and C++

Since the official launch of Arbitrum One on August 31, 2021, the Arbitrum ecosystem has provided developers with a suite of flexible tools to unleash their imagination and build stronger, more efficient, and unique products on blockchain. Today’s activation of Stylus on the Arbitrum One and Nova mainnets marks another milestone, further enhancing Arbitrum's efforts in empowering developers.

Coinciding with Arbitrum’s third anniversary celebration, Stylus is now live on both the Arbitrum One and Nova mainnets. In the future, Orbit chains will also have the option to independently choose whether to adopt and experiment with this new technology—after all, Arbitrum has always stood by the principle of: Your Chain, Your Rules.

Solidity remains one of the most widely used smart contract languages on Ethereum. There's no denying Solidity’s pivotal role in shaping blockchain development, and it will continue to play an important part going forward. However, building smart contracts with Solidity comes with certain challenges. From a data perspective, there are currently estimated to be around 20,000 Solidity developers, a number far smaller than Rust’s 3 million developers or C/C++’s 12 million.

Stylus offers efficient and secure programming tools for developing smart contracts. Any language that compiles to WebAssembly (WASM) is supported, including Rust and others. This is because Stylus introduces a parallel virtual machine that is fully interoperable with the EVM, designed specifically to execute WASM instead of EVM bytecode. Rather than replacing the EVM, this VM works alongside it to facilitate state transitions and execution of their respective bytecodes, offering performance optimizations over the EVM.

Moreover, thanks to decades of compiler development for Rust and C, WASM programs are significantly more efficient than those written in Solidity. This enables developers to create complex cryptographic and computational tasks that would otherwise be extremely gas-intensive. Notably, Solidity contracts and WASM contracts are fully interoperable—Solidity contracts can freely call Rust contracts and vice versa. By choosing Rust, developers gain immediate access to a full suite of development tools and on-chain capabilities.

With these new programming languages and the high-performance WASM virtual machine, developers now have more expressive coding tools to push the boundaries of on-chain innovation. Additionally, the WASM VM introduced by Stylus can significantly reduce gas costs for complex smart contracts, meaning compute- and memory-intensive applications will see dramatically lower operational costs when using Stylus.

The launch of Stylus on Arbitrum One and Nova aligns with our vision of scaling Ethereum. With Stylus, we are better equipped than ever to explore broader, uncharted territories in blockchain. We invite even more developers to join us on this journey.

【Click here to watch the video and learn more about Stylus】

Build With Us

While the Stylus ecosystem holds immense potential for growth and expansion, it remains in its early stages at launch. Although foundational components are already in place, we look forward to enriching the ecosystem with additional developer tools and features to further drive innovation. This means pioneering developers using Stylus today will not only build actively but also help shape and refine Stylus as it evolves.

Several early adopter teams are already building with Stylus. Below are some project examples to help illustrate what Stylus makes possible.

• Renegade Finance

Renegade is building an “onchain dark pool,” a new type of privacy-preserving decentralized exchange. Similar to traditional finance dark pools, Renegade enables size-hidden trading for high-quality execution without MEV, slippage, spread, or price impact. At its core, Renegade leverages multi-party computation (MPC) and zero-knowledge proofs to ensure privacy before and after trades.

Andrew, Founding Engineer at Renegade, shared:

“Without Stylus, this exchange wouldn’t be nearly as fast, cheap, or secure.”

• Superposition

Superposition’s AMM contract, “Longtail,” is a concentrated liquidity AMM designed for seamless cross-chain liquidity while minimizing market risk. Thanks to Stylus, Longtail aims to consolidate all liquidity into a single contract, sharing only one asset (fUSDC) across pools. The AMM also supports Permit2, enabling users to interact with tokens more seamlessly and at lower cost.

Alex, Founder of Superposition, said:

“Stylus is the best of both worlds—it combines the expressiveness, efficiency, and security of the Rust ecosystem with the richness of the EVM. We chose Stylus to build the lowest-cost and most secure DeFi suite on EVM, without sacrificing composability. Stylus is a game-changer that makes this possible.”

• Crypto Valley Exchange

Stylus provides Crypto Valley Exchange with tools leveraging Rust, WASM, and LLVM, enabling the team to deploy highly efficient smart contracts that remain fully interoperable with the Ethereum ecosystem. This capability allows them to implement portfolio margining for derivatives trading directly on-chain.

Ivan, CTO of Crypto Valley Exchange, stated:

“Thanks to Stylus, we can fully harness the power of Rust, WASM, and LLVM to create advanced and highly efficient smart contracts while maintaining complete interoperability with the entire Ethereum ecosystem. Stylus is the only solution that enables us to achieve comprehensive on-chain functionality such as portfolio margining for derivatives trading.”

• Fairblock

Fairblock uses Stylus to implement multi-party computation (MPC) schemes like threshold identity-based encryption—something not feasible using only EVM opcodes. These algorithms unlock the potential to build various applications, including frontrun-resistant orders, player-versus-player (PVP) games, NFT blind boxes, coercion-resistant voting, and confidential AI.

Ecosystem Support

The adoption of Stylus relies on collective advancement across the ecosystem. Many partners in Web3 are working together to make Stylus more accessible and widely usable.

• Etherscan: The popular block explorer and analytics platform Etherscan is supporting verification and interaction with Stylus contracts on Arbitrum rollups and Orbit chains, enhancing trust and accessibility for Stylus smart contracts.

• OpenZeppelin: As a provider of open-source smart contract libraries and security solutions, OpenZeppelin is building a Stylus library for Rust to make development safer and more reliable, helping accelerate Stylus adoption.

• Tenderly: As a full-stack Web3 infrastructure provider, Tenderly will support Stylus through block discovery, execution, and simulation. Their roadmap also includes improved tracing and virtual testnet capabilities to enhance Stylus compatibility.

Next Steps

Going forward, Offchain Labs will continue developing the Stylus SDK and improving the CLI. Committed to building durable, transparent, and open products, Offchain Labs aims to help more people understand and adopt Stylus. In the coming weeks, Arbitrum will host several key events. Here are some highlights:

• Stylus AMA Series

Starting September 2, the Arbitrum Foundation will host weekly AMA sessions, inviting teams using Stylus to share their development experiences and discuss how these tools empower their products and services.

• Mainnet Mint Event

To celebrate the launch of Stylus, the Arbitrum Foundation will host a mint event for the first NFT contract powered by Stylus! Created by artist Jimena Buena Vita, this NFT collection will go live on September 9, 2024.

• StylusPro Series

We plan to host live webinars in late September and late October targeting advanced developers interested in Stylus, encouraging the creation of previously impossible innovations or use cases on EVM, such as:

• Zero-knowledge proofs;

• Curve25519 validation and other cryptographic methods;

• Fully homomorphic encryption;

• Black-Scholes model for options pricing;

• Proof of storage.

• Stylus Sprint

The Stylus Sprint initiative aims to encourage early development of Stylus smart contracts and tools, ultimately expanding Stylus’s utility across the broader crypto community and unlocking new application potentials.

Currently, a DAO proposal is seeking approval to allocate up to 5 million ARB in rewards for the Stylus Sprint program. The proposal is currently awaiting feedback from the Arbitrum DAO. If approved, team applications will open on October 4.

Conclusion

As the largest execution-layer upgrade in Arbitrum’s history, Arbitrum Stylus frees developers from being limited to traditional Solidity, enabling them to deploy apps using their preferred languages—including Rust, C, and C++—while remaining fully composable with the EVM. This leap not only elevates the experience for developers and users alike but also opens the door for applications from across the entire tech industry, including Web2. As Stylus continues to gain adoption and evolve, we look forward to witnessing even greater innovation within the Arbitrum ecosystem.