Reportedly, Arbitrumis a scaling solution meant for Ethereum.  It drastically brings down costs and latency. Arbitrum is also known as “Optimistic Rollup” as it instantly scales apps, reducing costs and increasing capacity, without sacrificing on Ethereum’s security.

When it comes to porting contracts to Arbitrum, there is no need for code changes or downloads because Arbitrum is completely compatible with all the existing Ethereum developer tooling. Also, Arbitrum has been live on the public testnet since October.

The Arbitrum team are already working with several dozens of launch partners ahead of their upcoming release on the Ethereum mainnet. Some of these projects are found on their testnet portal.

Arbitrum have announced $3,000 each to bounties covering for:  “Best use of Arbitrum’s scalability, best use of cross-chain interop, best use of Arbitrum Protocol, best Arbitrum related tooling.”

This is just one of the protocols proposed for scaling Ethereum, there are several others like Optimism, zkSync, Starkware, Skale, Polygon and many more.

For clarity, Optimistic Ethereum, based on the concept of Optimistic Rollup is an application inside Ethereum which executes transactions very efficiently than Ethereum itself.

zkSync is a user-centric zkRollup developed by Matter Labs.  It makes use of zero-knowledge proofs to keep data availability on mainnet to achieve exponentially lower transaction costs.

They are currently rapidly developing zkSync 2.0, featuring EVM-compatibility in testnet May 2021 and soon they say it will be followed by zkPorter, their new exponential scalability solution.

StarkWare makes use of scaling solutions for permission-less blockchains. StarkWare also makes use of Cairo, which is a Turing-complete language meant for scaling dApps by making use of STARK proofs.

Cairo powers StarkEx, which is a scalability engine for transfers, trades, and minting, it is used by dYdX, Immutable X, and diversify. Also, shortly Cairo will be powering StarkNet, which is a decentralized permission-less ZK-Rollup for general computation.  STARK does not have any trusted setup and it is the most efficient proof system on the market.

The prizes are different for different scalability protocols.  Users might have to check the exhaustive list of solutions and check the prize pools through different solutions.

Someone on a lighter note stated, there isn’t a scaling problem – there is a Chinese mining cartel problem.

While the rest of the world is tired waiting to see Ethereum scale, there is lot of hard work happening to ensure that Ethereum achieves scalability.  With so much of work going on, ETH will not be the sinking Titanic it will definitely achieve scalability.