The Offchain Labs team, behind L2-protocol Arbitrum, unveiled Stylus, a tool that enables creating smart contracts in several popular programming languages.
The developers published the solution’s code and launched a public testnet.
«Arbitrum Stylus enables the use of traditional EVM-tools for building apps on Arbitrum, as well as WASM-compatible languages such as Rust, C, and C++», the team explained.
According to the announcement, Stylus “significantly” reduces gas costs, enables new resource-intensive blockchain use cases, C++-based gaming, and previously unavailable AI-model computations.
The rollout became possible after the deployment of the Nitro update. The update implemented a transaction-authentication system using WASM languages, and also allowed configuring and compiling the AVM through compatible tools.
Offchain Labs noted that Stylus potentially expands the ability to build applications on Arbitrum—from around 20,000 Solidity developers to millions of programmers using Rust and C.
The tool offers full compatibility with traditional EVM contracts and faster execution.
To promote Stylus, the company will host a hackathon with a $20,000 prize as part of ETHGlobal NY. The team also announced a grant program from the Arbitrum Foundation for research and development of the solution.
In June, Offchain Labs released the tool for implementing layer-3 blockchains using the Orbit software stack.