Ethereum’s Arbitrum Hits Pause On Odyssey NFT Campaign

Ethereum’s Arbitrum hits pause on the Odyssey NFT campaign after fees on the layer-2 solution surpassed even those on the ETH mainnet so let’s read more today in our latest Ethereum news.

It can be hard to explain the differences between a decent sustainable product and the temporary financial incentives in the crypto spaces. The crypto products are quite clunky as they are asking users to jump thorugh plenty of hoops just to move money around. If moving the money around means that you can earn more money, the product can enjoy a lot of traction.

Defi offers another example of a dynamic like yield farms, airdrops, and so on. The same dynamic is at play with layer-2 service Hop Protocol and the ETH scaler Arbitrum as they partnered for a unique campaign. Before digging in, Hop is a layer 2 scaling solution and with it, you can move money from Polygon to Arbitrum and from Ethereum to Optimism but also these bridges have a waiting period before you can get your money out.  For example, it can take up to a week to withdraw bridged funds from Arbitrum but the activity for both products is booming. Arbitrum even saw higher gas fees than the ETH mainnet and the reason behind the surge is the Odyssey campaign on Arbitrum.

The team behind the scaling solution is expected to dole out the different NFTs to users that execute tasks in the Arbitrum ecosystem. The task for the first week was to bridge assets to Arbitrum from a number of crypto bridges and also, the users that use the bridge that ends up getting the most volume, will be able to claim a bonus NFT. The campaign appeared well-designed and inclusive so Ethereum’s Arbitrum hits pause on the Odyssey:

“Because of the heavy load being put on the chain causing higher than normal gas fees, we’ve decided it is best to pause the Odyssey until Nitro is released so that all communities and projects within Arbitrum continue to have a friction-free experience.”

Nitro is another piece of scaling technology that will be put in place after the project but now, Arbitrum slows the network whenever there is extreme capacity. Also, Arbitrum was brought to its knees thanks to the incentive program which seems like a bad outcome beucase it is supposed to help scale. As for Hop, the service performed well and onboarded 165,000 new users.