Arbitrum
- Ticker
- ARB
- Category
- Scaling network
- Risk profile
- Volatile
What it is
An optimistic rollup that executes transactions off the Ethereum main chain and posts the results back to it, so users pay Ethereum-level security costs only once per batch.
Why this risk level
- Transactions are ordered by a sequencer and settled on Ethereum, so fees are far lower than transacting on Ethereum directly while the final record still lives there
- Withdrawals back to Ethereum pass through a challenge window measured in days, during which a fraud proof can dispute the posted result — bridges that offer instant exits are third parties taking that risk for a fee
- ARB is a governance token for the protocol's DAO; it is not the network's gas token and does not confer a share of sequencer revenue
A plain-English risk overview for education, not investment advice. Risk profiles describe the asset's own characteristics, not a price forecast — always do your own research before buying.
Other coin guides
Aave AAVEVolatileA decentralised lending protocol where deposits sit in shared pools and borrowers take overcollateralised loans against assets they lock, with interest rates set by how much of a pool is in use.Algorand ALGOVolatileA smart-contract network whose consensus draws a fresh random committee for every block and finalises it on the spot, so the chain never reorganises and confirmations are not a waiting game.Aptos APTVolatileA proof-of-stake layer-1 launched in October 2022 by engineers from Meta's abandoned Diem project, built around the Move programming language and an execution engine that processes independent transactions in parallel rather than one after another.Avalanche AVAXVolatileA proof-of-stake smart-contract platform designed around fast transaction finality and the ability for projects to run their own separate, application-specific chains.Bitcoin BTCEstablishedThe original cryptocurrency and still the largest by market value, with over fifteen years of continuous operation and no successful attack on its core network.Bitcoin Cash BCHVolatileA network created by a 2017 hard fork of Bitcoin, taking the opposite side of a long argument about whether to scale by enlarging blocks or by moving activity to other layers.