Pheasant Comes to Arbitrum

The wait is over for the Arbitrum community! Starting today, users on Arbitrum - an optimistic rollup developed by Offchain Labs - can transfer their assets to and from Layer 1 via Pheasant Network. They can now leverage Pheasant’s optimistic bridges to enjoy much cheaper, more decentralized and more seamless transactions without compromising on security and decentralization. We believe integrating the network with one of the most vibrant ecosystems lays the groundwork for Ethereum’s sustainable prosperity.

Cheaper Transactions with Optimistic Approaches

Arbitrum is an optimistic rollup offering a suite of scaling solutions to extend the throughput of Ethereum. At the time of writing, this popular Layer 2 tops the list of TVL among other rollups, with 5.8 billion dollars locked in the protocol and over 50% share of the entire L2 market according to L2BEAT. As an EVM-compatible rollup, Arbitrum hosts various products originally developed for Ethereum such as Uniswap and OpenSea as well as dapps natively built on Arbitrum like Mycelium and Vesta Finance.

As is the case with any other optimistic rollup, Arbitrum assumes all the transactions submitted on Layer 2 are valid without requiring Layer 1 to verify them unless anything dubious is found, minimizing the work that needs to be done on the base layer. This is very similar to how Pheasant Network works: expecting all the transactions coming through the bridges from or to Layer 2 to be legitimate and checking their validity on the Layer 1 level only when someone disputes them, enabling much cheaper bridge transactions.

One of the most significant advantages of Arbitrum is its cost-efficiency, powered by the optimistic technology discussed above, combined with the multi-round fraud-proof method. The multi-round fraud-proof method is a security system that relies on a validator and challenger (an actor who disputes the validity of a transaction executed by a validator) to interact with each other back and forth to identify a specific step they disagree on in case of a potentially fraudulent activity. Layer 1 then resolves the dispute by inspecting only the particular step in question instead of validating the entire block of transactions. This approach leads to a further reduction in gas fees since it requires much less computation power on Layer 1.

How Pheasant Network Ensures Security

One of the many things you must factor in when using a new protocol is its security. No matter how amazing a product appears, if it lacks robustness, you might want to stay away. A particularly important aspect to look into when it comes to optimistic bridges is how they secure communications between networks and layers when a fraudulent behavior is found. Let’s have a closer look.

Our Arbitrum-Ethereum bridge relies on Arbitrum’s well-established function named createRetryableTicket in a contract called Inbox to guarantee security. More precisely, should there be any suspicious activity, the protocol triggers a verification process to acquire from Layer 1 a Blockhash containing information about the transaction in question, send it to Arbitrum through the Inbox contract and store it on the Layer 2 network. The protocol then checks the validity of the transaction, comparing it to the stored Blockhash data.

The disputing process on Arbitrium is fundamentally the same as for Optimism (read this blog for further information). What is different, however, is the cost of gas fees a disputer, an actor who challenges the validity of a suspicious transaction, bears.

On Optimism, Pheasant’s disputers only need to incur the cost for acquiring a Blockhash on Ethereum but not for storing it on Optimism. This is because a contract on Optimism named CrossDomainMessenger, an equivalent of Arbitrum’s Inbox contract, covers gas fees for any transactions coming through the contract with a gas limit of up to 1.92 million gas. This number is much greater than the total gas fees needed to store a Blockhash on Layer 2 .

On the other hand, the L1-L2 communication process of Arbitrum starts with creating a ticket called “RetryableTicket” that will be executed when the cross-layer transaction the ticket is assigned to fails. It is the issuer of the ticket, not the protocol, who pays the fee for generating the ticket. This means a disputer must bear the cost for ticket issuance as well as the gas fees for acquiring a Blockhash on Layer 1 and storing it on Layer 2. While it is possible for tech-savvy disputers to calculate on their own the total cost they need to incur, using nodeInterface and the Inbox contract Arbitrum provides, Pheasant Network is working to implement a feature that automatically fetches the total amount of fees a disputer needs to pay.

All the Layer 2s as One

The integration of Arbitrum represents a step closer to a perfectly interconnected, seamless Ethereum ecosystem. With this launch, Pheasant Network has become an even more powerful infrastructure with hundreds of dapps. Although we are proud of our achievement so far, the dev team is working around the clock to welcome more Layer 2s and improve the network.

Tune in to our blog, follow us on Twitter for the latest updates and join Discord to ask questions and share your voices. We are very much looking forward to your participation!

About Optimistic Bridges

Optimistic bridges, inspired by the design of optimistic rollups, allow users to transfer tokens from one chain to another in an “optimistic” manner. Optimistic transfers mean that the protocol does not require Ethereum to verify all of the bridge transactions but checks only fraudulent-looking ones. This mechanism is similar to how optimistic rollups work, where the protocol approves all transactions executed on Layer 2 by default and triggers the verification process on the Layer 1 level only when something suspicious is found. This structure leads to a drastic cut in gas fees and a higher degree of decentralization, enhancing the scalability and interoperability of the Ethereum ecosystem.

About Pheasant Network

Pheasant Network is an optimistic bridge network inspired by the idea of optimistic rollups. We aim to bring the concept to bridge architecture to address Ethereum’s interoperability challenges as well as scalability issues. Our robust security system and cost-effective design enable cheaper and faster asset transfers between Ethereum and Layer 2 networks while ensuring security and decentralization. We believe that optimistic solutions are the answer to future bridge development.

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