KAKI’s Journey of Deploying on Arbitrum

Arbitrum is one of the solutions from the Ethereum Layer2 Rollups family, designed to better handle the high throughput and gas fees of the DeFi protocol on Ethereum. These rollup solutions are based on the principle of putting results on-chain and executing computation and storage off-chain. Simply put, participants submit their transaction data to the Ethereum chain and all users are able to view the transactions, however, the computation and storage of the transactions are performed off-chain. The Layer2 track is still early in its development, and the current scaling solutions on this track are first movers. Many teams willing to deploy Layer 2 networks have chosen Arbitrum, as evidenced by the fact that there are now over 250 projects intended to build on Abitrum.

The advantages of Arbitrum are fourfold.

Firstly, it supports Solidity and EVM, which reduces the cost of relearning for developers. This one alone is enough to make it stand out. Etherchain is ecologically complete enough to provide many tools for developers, which makes the development efficiency very high. Whatever is missing in the Ethereum world, some developers will soon fill the gap.

Secondly, it is more open and inclusive. Arbitrum is open source and very developer-friendly, and the smart contracts can be compiled and written in languages other than Solidity, and run on Arbitrum at the same time. Do you know why there are so many apps on Android? These apps are not only developed by Google itself but many other companies. This is because Android is open source and everyone can deploy apps on it. Likewise, this feature of Arbitrum will make it possible for many small and medium-sized projects to deploy in the short term.

Thirdly, trustless. The word “trustless” might be a bit difficult to understand, I prefer to call it no supervision. As long as there is an honest participant, it can be ensured that Arbitrum advances towards the right outcome. This makes transactions much more efficient and makes it easier for DApps to deal with large numbers of users and transactions.

Fourthly, lower GAS fees while ensuring the speed of transactions. The official team developed Arbiswap as a demo project based on Uniswap, and the GAS fee for Arbiswap is about 55th of Uniswap’s and the transaction speed is 55 times faster than Uniswap.

Is Arbitrum the best solution for now? Why don’t we choose ZK ROLLUP or BSC?

Of course not! There is no such thing as the best solution at the moment!

Arbitrum also has its drawbacks, which is the long waiting time for cross-chain withdrawals due to the performance and price of layer 1, which somewhat affects the user experience. If you want to transfer funds from Arbitrum to the Ethereum chain, it takes a few days. And you can only withdraw the assets if no one questions them during that time. This is reflected in KAKI’s no-loss option is that when we withdraw funds, it takes seven days of waiting time to change KDAI to DAI; whereas ZK Rollup can withdraw assets in a few hours. However, the zero-knowledge proof used in ZK has a very complex computational logic and very high arithmetic and storage requirements, which requires higher GAS fees for ordinary users to use ZK; and expensive costs for application developers to deploy a large number of computation and storage servers. In addition, ZK’s editor turns the high-level language into the underlying language, which neither supports Solidity language development nor EVM (Ethernet Virtual Machine), making the development relatively inefficient and not developer-friendly. ZK Rollup may be a good solution in the future, however, distant water won’t quench your immediate thirst. It is not wise to choose ZK Rollup at present.

Speaking of BSC, it is indeed an easier path, but not safe enough. The “not safe enough” here can be interpreted in two aspects. One aspect is that BSC is run by 21 node service providers, the degree of decentralization is far less than Arbitrum. From another aspect, a large number of projects on BSC directly fork the projects on the Etherchain, what they do is simply replicate and combine the protocols. It is important to know that as DeFi becomes richer, in the combinability of the protocol, if we do the combinations or innovations without fully understanding the logic behind the original protocol, there will be potential bugs and risks, allowing hackers to attack. This is what Vitalik stated about the project’s lack of “orthodoxy”. Compared to other chains, Arbitrum network is less vulnerable and more secure. This is because even though many public chains claim to be “Ethereum killers”, and have hundreds of times the TPS (transaction-per-second) of the Ethereum, Ethereum is still the king at the moment. It is the orthodoxy that makes its infrastructure more completed, which makes it more developer-friendly and makes KAKI insistent on choosing it.

Is KAKI running smoothly on Arbitrum? Have there been any problems during development?

According to a core member of the KAKI development team, the KAKI team started to deploy on the Arb test net in January, and the Arb test net had a lot of problems at that time, including unstable nodes and even server outages, token bridges not being compatible with all tokens, browser display issues, smart contract errors, etc. KAKI’s dev team also submitted several bugs to Arbitrum. Because of KAKI’s high frequency of test transactions, the percentage of test transactions in the V3 and V4 test networks reached 70–80% at one point, and even 90% at the highest point. Another core issue is that KAKI runs a price oracle, which is designed to ensure high frequency and accurate price updates during trading. However, Chainlink is not deployed on arb, so KAKI does not have access to prices on the Layer 2 network, and ensuring price accuracy is critical for a project like KAKI. To effectively solve this problem, the KAKI development team worked tirelessly to develop and deployed a price provisioning mechanism on Arbitrum itself. In addition, KAKI has also deployed a price aggregator to allow for future access to accurate prices from price providers such as uniswap, sushiswap, chainlink, etc. The goal of KAKI is to make price sources as decentralized, fair, and equitable as possible.

Arbitrum announced the launch of its main website on May 28th and opened the whitelist to a small number of developers. Before the main net launch, KAKI has sent a deployment request to the Arbitrum team and was successfully added to the first developers’ whitelist to get a sneak preview and access. Now, after the launch of the main Arb network, KAKI is working intensively on interfacing and testing the lossless option protocol as well as testing the performance and features of the Arb network in a real environment. Behind all the development difficulties KAKI has overcome, the development team members have put in countless hours of hard work to provide a safer and more user-friendly experience. We believe that KAKI will bring an extraordinary user experience after overcoming all the difficulties. Let’s look forward to it together!