Offchain Labs CEO Steven Goldfeder’s crypto origin story is clas
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Offchain Labs CEO Steven Goldfeder’s crypto origin story is classic geek gold. As a student at Princeton, he first heard about Bitcoin in 2013 during a visit day at Princeton.
Professor Ed Felten — the future inventor of rollups on Ethereum, co-founder of Arbitrum and a White House science advisor — gave a five-minute lightning talk about the cost of a government destroying Bitcoin.
Goldfeder’s curiosity was instantly piqued, and that night, other students hosted a poker game with a half-BTC buy-in. As he says:
“That was back in the days when that was just ten bucks. If only I’d held onto it…”
Goldfeder doesn’t really need to worry about that missed opportunity now that Arbitrum has become a major force in crypto. It was designed to fix some of the issues plaguing Ethereum, such as high gas fees, sluggish transaction speeds and scalability bottlenecks. It’s currently the leader among Ethereum L2 scaling solutions.
But rollups have been criticized for relying too heavily on centralized sequencer revenue and for a lack of interoperability and composability in the ecosystem. Ethereum Foundation researchers have proposed making rollups “based” and/or “native” to fix these problems.
Despite reports coming out of January’s sequencing call suggesting Arbitrum would embrace these solutions, Goldfeder appears to have had a rethink.
Why Arbitrum won’t become a based rollup
Based rollups use Ethereum’s validators for sequencing, opening up the possibility of interoperability and composability among L2s. Native rollups, meanwhile, woulduse Ethereum’s base layer network to replace fraud-proof systems and make L2s as secure as Ethereum itself.
But Goldfeder now sounds a lot more skeptical about the benefits for Arbitrum in adopting the tech.
“Just to clarify the terms, you know, a based rollup is basically a rollup without a sequencer that uses Ethereum for sequencing. Actually, if you look at that initial Arbitrum paper that we wrote in 2018, you might call it a based rollup. It doesn’t have a sequencer; that only came later,” he says.
As for native execution, he echoes Vitalik Buterin’s sentiment: Ethereum’s strength lies in its diversity.
“And one thing we experiment in is different execution models. So, Arbitrum is fully EVM but also has something called Stylus, which gives you the ability to write smart contracts in other languages such as Rust, C and C++,” he says.
“But I think having put this system in production for four years, in different testnet phases, I think the design that we’ve come on is actually the correct one.”
“So, I don’t think Arbitrum will become a based rollup anytime soon, and I don’t think that it should when it comes to native execution.”
Magazine decided to seek further clarification and context from Arbitrum on its position after the interview was conducted. Regarding the chances of his L2 becoming a based rollup, Goldfeder confirmed in a statement that he believes Arbitrum’s current design is “more efficient, practical, and cost-effective” than based rollup designs.
He was more circumspect about the chances of Arbitrum making use of the technology that underpins native rollups but made no commitment to do so.
“I support Vitalik’s view of native rollups, which envisions a common core that we factor out that will be useful by many rollups, but also provides for rollups to extend that with additional features,” he said. “Some rollups may choose to stop at the common core, but it’s crucial that we also support continued innovation and experimentation at the execution layer.”
From poker to protocols: Origins of Arbitrum
After Goldfeder’s crypto introduction at Princeton in 2013, his academic pursuits led him into cryptography and multiparty computation, ultimately landing him in the thick of blockchain security research.
By 2018, he had co-founded Offchain Labs with the aforementioned Felten, reviving an old Princeton research project. The result? Arbitrum — the rollup solution whose history actually predates Ethereum going live.
Unlike the many crypto projects with names that sound like bad sci-fi movie titles, Arbitrum has a clear etymology. “It comes from arbitration,” Goldfeder explains. “So, the idea is we take as much computation off Ethereum as possible while having Ethereum to be the sort of referee. If something goes wrong, Ethereum can, you know, fix things.”
This approach aligns perfectly with Ethereum’s philosophy — decentralized, permissionless and resilient.
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