Skip to main content

Overview of Arbitrum chains

Arbitrum chains give you flexibility and control without the constraint of running your own Layer 1 blockchain. Instead of bootstrapping and subsidizing your own validator set, your chain anchors its security and finality to Ethereum, turning security into a variable, usage-based expense.

That economic model is the core reason to choose Arbitrum: your business captures the fee revenue and priority-access value that L1s hand off to validators, because costs scale with usage (gas targets) rather than set (fixed) fees. You also control the economics directly—custom gas tokens, fee policy, and revenue capture—while getting institution-grade settlement: sub-second soft finality for a responsive user experience, configurable hard finality on Ethereum in minutes, and native withdrawals in as little as 15 minutes, backed by a clean, externally legible counterparty-risk story for your risk, audit, and compliance stakeholders.

Beyond economics, an Arbitrum chain lets you launch fast and customize deeply. You get day-one configuration over high, fully tunable throughput and block times (as low as 100ms), data availability (Rollup, AnyTrust, or external DA), sequencing and MEV rules, KYC/AML and permissioning, privacy, precompiles, governance, and multi-prover settlement—and you automatically inherit every future Ethereum and Arbitrum upgrade, including Stylus, without custom engineering.

Critically, your chain isn't siloed: it plugs directly into Ethereum's deep liquidity and the broader Arbitrum ecosystem. And you can de-risk your go-to-market with a phased "launch-and-migrate" path—prove your product on the shared, liquid Arbitrum One, then graduate to your own dedicated Arbitrum chain as a seamless continuation on the same stack, not a costly replatforming.

Arbitrum chain settlement layers

Customization​

Speed and finality​

Set confirmation speed and settlement behavior for products where timing and certainty matter—payments, trading, treasury, and internal asset movement.

Tune block time​

  • Your benefit
    • You own the speed-versus-cost tradeoff. Faster blocks let you position the chain as a premium, low-latency venue (trading, gaming, payments) without waiting on a third party to change infrastructure.
  • User benefit
    • Near-instant confirmations make the app feel like a familiar web experience rather than a slow onchain one, reducing the “did my transaction go through?” hesitation.
  • Guides

Configure deposit finality​

  • Your benefit
    • You match certainty guarantees to your actual risk profile to avoid paying for stronger finality than your product needs. Adjust the time before the chain processes a deposit.
  • User benefit
    • Predictable, well-defined settlement means users know exactly when funds and actions are final—important for anyone moving real value.
  • Guide

Enable fast withdrawals to reduce withdrawal finality time​

  • Your benefit
    • Fewer support tickets and complaints about locked-up capital, and a more competitive bridging story when users compare your chain to alternatives.
  • User benefit
    • Users get their funds in minutes instead of waiting the full challenge window, dramatically lowering the friction of exiting the chain.
  • Guide
Note

The 100ms figure is an optional lower bound on block time, not the default. Most chains run at the 250ms default; 100ms is available when you opt into it. By default, fast withdrawals is not enabled—the default withdrawal time is 6.4 days.

Transaction pricing model​

Align costs with your business model, including the option to use a custom gas token that fits customer experience, treasury strategy, or internal accounting needs.

Use a custom ERC-20 as the native gas token​

  • Your benefit
    • You can drive utility to your own token, align fee revenue with your treasury strategy, and simplify internal accounting by denominating gas in the unit you already track.
  • User benefit
    • Users pay fees in a familiar or branded token rather than acquiring a separate asset, removing a common onboarding hurdle.
  • Guides

Manage the fee parameters that govern what users pay and fee distribution​

  • Your benefit
    • Direct control over cost recovery and revenue, so you can tune the chain's economics to be self-sustaining or subsidized as your business model requires.
  • User benefit
    • Transparent, deliberately set fees rather than opaque or volatile costs, which builds trust in the pricing.
  • Guide

Configure native mint/burn behavior for the gas token​

  • Your benefit
    • You can use a cross-chain-native token (such as a stablecoin) as your gas token, so it moves in and out of your chain through canonical interop protocols instead of lock-and-mint wrappers—keeping your treasury and accounting denominated in the real asset.
  • User benefit
    • Users hold and pay fees in the canonical token rather than a wrapped derivative, so their gas balance stays fungible and redeemable across chains.
  • Guide

Dynamic pricing​

  • Your benefit
    • You smooth out pricing (gas fee) volatility by setting multiple gas targets that react to short-term spikes and long-term load separately, so brief demand bursts don't turn into severe, sustained gas-price spikes.
  • User benefit
    • More stable, predictable fees during periods of high demand instead of sudden, sharp cost increases exactly when the chain is busiest.
  • Guide

Throughput and latency​

Handle higher volumes and faster response times for products that cannot degrade during periods of peak demand.

Dedicated throughput​

  • Your benefit
    • Guaranteed capacity means you can make performance commitments (effectively an SLA) to partners and customers without worrying about noisy-neighbor contention for computation and storage resources.
  • User benefit
    • Consistent performance during peak events—launches, drops, market volatility—instead of degraded speed exactly when demand is highest.
  • Guide

Set the gas target to match your expected load​

  • Your benefit
    • You provision capacity to match your expected transaction volume—scaling up for high-throughput workloads or holding it lean to manage operating costs—so throughput planning becomes a controllable lever rather than a fixed constraint you inherit.
  • User benefit
    • Capacity provisioned to real demand means orders and settlements continue to clear promptly even during peak volume, rather than facing delays or failed transactions when the network is congested.
  • Guides

Privacy and access controls​

Create participation rules and data access controls that align with regulated workflows and protect sensitive information.

Run permissioned validators​

Vet and restrict who participates in validation—useful for enterprise or regulated environments (for example, KYC for validators).

  • Your benefit
    • You can meet regulatory and legal requirements, reduce compliance risk, and make the chain viable for enterprise and institutional partners who can't operate on a fully open infrastructure.
  • User benefit
    • Assurance that the chain operates within a vetted, accountable set of participants–a prerequisite for many regulated financial and enterprise products.
  • Guide

Restrict who can read chain data​

Keep data off the public Layer 1 with an AnyTrust data availability committee.

  • Your benefit
    • You keep sensitive business and user data out of a fully public ledger, satisfying privacy obligations and protecting competitive information.
  • User benefit
    • Greater confidentiality around their activity and data than a fully public chain would offer.
  • Guide

Move to permissionless validation later​

  • Your benefit
    • You can launch with tight control and decentralize on your own timeline—no re-platforming required as your product and risk tolerance mature.
  • User benefit
    • A credible path to stronger trustlessness and censorship resistance over time, rather than being locked into a permissioned model forever.
  • Guide
Note
These controls apply at the validator and data-availability layers—who validates the chain and who can read its data. They are not a per-user transaction allowlist; screening which end users may submit transactions is an application-layer concern, not a chain-config setting.

Transaction sequencing​

Customize transaction ordering to match your product, whether the priority is wider access, lower MEV exposure, or tighter handling of transaction flow.

Keep the default FCFS ordering​

For intuitive, simple first-come, first-serve (FCFS) ordering that the world's largest exchanges use for trading.

  • Your benefit
    • Fair, simple ordering keeps fast block times and avoids the reputational cost of a chain seen as hostile to ordinary users.
  • User benefit
    • Built-in protection from front-running and sandwich attacks, so users aren't quietly taxed by MEV extractors on every trade.
  • Guide

Timeboost​

Enable Timeboost to auction an express lane, letting the chain owner capture MEV while preserving fair ordering for everyone else.

  • Your benefit
    • You capture MEV as a revenue stream for the chain rather than leaking it to external searchers.
  • User benefit
    • Non-express transactions keep their fair-ordering protections, while users who genuinely need priority have a transparent way to pay for it.
  • Guide

Governance and data availability​

Choose how the chain is upgraded, administered, and backed by data availability based on the balance of cost, transparency, and resilience you need.

Chain-owner role and access controls​

Govern upgrades and administration, and plan a path toward progressive decentralization.

  • Your benefit
    • You retain the control needed for upgrades and incident response early on, then deliberately decentralize as the chain matures—balancing agility with credibility.
  • User benefit
    • Clear accountability for who can change the chain, plus a visible path toward stronger, more decentralized guarantees.
  • Guide

Data availability model​

Choose your data availability model—Rollup, AnyTrust, or Alt-DA—to trade off cost against transparency and resilience.

  • Your benefit
    • You dial the cost-versus-security balance directly; AnyTrust can cut data costs substantially, while Rollup maximizes security and transparency.
  • User benefit
    • Lower fees when you choose AnyTrust, or maximum security and Ethereum-grade transparency when you choose Rollup
  • Guide

Performance​

On an Arbitrum chain, performance isn’t a single parameter—it’s the combined result of a few independent levers. Each trades one property against another (speed vs. infrastructure load, throughput vs. node stability, settlement speed vs. security), and you tune them to fit your product’s risk tolerance and demand profile. There are four primary parameters to configure, and language support capability is automatically included (no configuration needed).

Finality and settlement​

How quickly transactions become final and withdrawable. Set the delayed inbox finality, the challenge period, and fast withdrawals to balance settlement speed against reorg and security risk.

Delayed inbox, fast withdrawals, challenge period​

  • Your benefit
    • Delayed inbox finality, challenge period, and fast withdrawals—to balance settlement speed against reorg and security risk for your risk, audit, and compliance stakeholders.
  • User benefit
    • Faster, more predictable settlement: sub-second soft finality for responsiveness and quicker withdrawals back to the parent chain.
  • Guides

Cost and fee stability​

How predictable prices stay under load. Use Dynamic Pricing, fee management (base/surplus minimums), a gas price floor, and batch-poster fee tuning to smooth spikes and capture revenue.

Dynamic pricing, fee management, gas price floor, batch poster fee tuning​

  • Your benefit
    • Shape fee economics directly — Dynamic Pricing (multiple gas targets), base/surplus fee minimums, a gas price floor, and batch-poster fee tuning — to smooth price spikes and capture revenue while costs scale with usage.
  • User benefit
    • More stable, predictable transaction costs under load, avoiding sudden fee spikes during large payout runs or volatile periods.
  • Guides

Language support​

Stylus is inherited by every Arbitrum chain. It lets you develop smart contracts in languages your team may already know, instead of learning Solidity. Out of the box, it lets you write performant contracts in Rust, C, and C++ (plus community-tier AssemblyScript) alongside Solidity, reusing mature libraries while keeping full EVM compatibility.

Compliance​

Sanctioned-address screening at the protocol level​

Protocol-level transaction filtering added to the Sequencer and State Transition Function (STF), at the chain owner's discretion.

Your benefit​

  • Enables filtering as a first-class protocol capability to opt into, rather than building and maintaining bespoke tooling, while retaining full discretion over whether to enable it.
  • Can reuse an existing provider relationship and risk methodology rather than build screening in-house.
  • Can tailor enforcement granularity to policy—addresses, events, or both.
  • A ready-made menu of enforcement actions covering transfers, tokens, and opcodes.
  • The restricted set remains up to date without manual redeployment.

User benefit​

  • Transactions are screened by the network itself, so protection doesn’t depend on any single app behaving correctly.
  • Screening reflects industry-standard sanctions data rather than ad hoc lists.
  • Only the activity that the policy actually targets is blocked, reducing false positives.
  • Clearly scoped restrictions keep permitted activity available.
  • Newly sanctioned addresses are enforced promptly, improving protection.

Guide​

Continuous monitoring (synchronization pipeline)​

CLI flags​

  • Your benefit
    • Can tune update frequency and storage to their operational needs.
  • User benefit
    • Timely list updates mean less exposure to recently restricted addresses.
  • Guide

What problem do Arbitrum chains solve?​

Arbitrum chains are dedicated chains built with Arbitrum technology. Teams can configure execution, fee models, governance, data availability, validation, and other chain parameters for their application or business requirements.

The Ethereum ecosystem is supported by a decentralized network of nodes that each run Ethereum's Layer 1 (L1) client software. Ethereum's block space is in high demand, so users are often stuck waiting for the network to become less congested (and thus, less expensive).

Arbitrum's protocols address this challenge by offloading some of the Ethereum network's heavy lifting to another decentralized network of nodes that support the Arbitrum stack (Arbitrum chains).

How do Arbitrum chains help the Ethereum ecosystem?​

Arbitrum helps Ethereum move towards a multi-chain future. This is valuable for the following reasons:

  • Value: Scalability
    • Multiple chains help overcome scaling bottlenecks by dividing activity into opt-in environments with separate resource management.
  • Value: Flexible security models
    • Different chains can experiment with different security models, allowing for tradeoffs. For example: Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova are both L2 chains, with Arbitrum Nova giving developers the ability to optimize for lower fees. With Arbitrum chains, extending the technology and experimenting is easier than ever.
  • Value: Flexible execution environments
    • Different chains can experiment with more-or-less restrictive execution environments. For example, although Arbitrum chains are fully EVM compatible, Arbitrum chains can restrict smart contract functionality to optimize for your project's needs.
  • Value: Flexible governance
    • Arbitrum chains let you define your own governance protocols.

Are Arbitrum chains the same thing as "app chains"?​

It depends on your definition of "app chain". Arbitrum chains can be used as application-specific chains (often referred to as "app chains" or "appchains"). But they aren't just for apps. They're for hosting EVM-compatible smart contracts using self-managed infrastructure that isolates compute resources away from Arbitrum's public L2 chains based on your unique needs.

  • You can use your Arbitrum chain to host the smart contracts that support one decentralized app, two apps, an ecosystem of apps, or no apps at all.
  • Ethereum-grade security and interoperability, so your assets, users, and builders flow to/from Ethereum seamlessly and safely.
  • You can use your Arbitrum chain to host a private, centralized service.
  • Your Arbitrum chain can be special-purpose, general-purpose, and everything in-between.
  • Customize/tune your chain to your specific use case however you want.
  • You could even build an app that uses multiple Arbitrum chains to support strange new forms of redundancy, high availability, and trustlessness.