Why Arbitrum?

Ideamarket has some unique features among dapps:

1. There must be one “canonical” instance of it, because if there are multiple — say, one on Polygon and one on ETH — it will split the liquidity of all the assets and be less useful. So Ideamarket needs a single permanent home.

2. If Ideamarket succeeds, it will become the battlefield of the world’s propaganda, with billions of dollars competing to influence public opinion, as they do today. So Ideamarket’s single permanent home must be as difficult as possible for state actors to compromise.

These two features alone make it necessary to stay within the canonical ETH ecosystem, so that we inherit the security and decentralization of ETH L1. That leaves 2 options: OptimismPBC and Arbitrum.

We actually tried Optimism first! They announced in early 2021 that they would be ready in late March, so having launched in February, we spent all of March preparing to deploy on Optimism’s L2. We were ready to go — then they announced a delay until July, so we checked out Arbitrum. Our founding CTO, Alexander Schlindwein, found Arbitrum’s solutions to various technical problems superior to Optimism, and he was glad we switched, having seen both canonical ETH L2s up close. (And he won 3 of the largest bug bounties in the history of Ethereum, so I tend to trust his judgment on such things).