Arbitrum Activates Dia Upgrade: Gas Fee Volatility Finally Has a Solution, L2 Competition Takes Another Step Forward

Arbitrum has activated the ArbOS Dia upgrade, which the official team describes as a major optimization of the tech stack. According to the latest news, this upgrade introduces support for Fusaka EIP and improves multiple aspects such as the pricing model, user experience, and network security. Considering that this week’s ARB will unlock 92.65 million tokens (worth approximately $18.8 million) on January 16, the timing of this upgrade is noteworthy.

Core Improvements of the Upgrade: Substantial Optimizations in Four Dimensions

Reconstructed pricing model to address gas fluctuations during peak times

What was the biggest pain point before the upgrade? Gas fees would fluctuate dramatically during peak periods, making costs unpredictable for users. The Dia upgrade introduces a new pricing model aimed at smoothing out these fluctuations. Specifically, it employs a more refined fee calculation mechanism to prevent gas prices from spiking suddenly during high usage, thereby enhancing predictability.

At the same time, the upgrade raises the minimum base fee from 0.01 gwei to 0.02 gwei. This seemingly simple change actually serves as a safeguard against malicious attacks. A higher base fee threshold can effectively suppress attack behaviors that flood the network with大量低成本交易进行垃圾填充 (large volumes of low-cost transactions for spam).

User experience upgrade, aligning with Ethereum standards

The Dia upgrade aligns with Ethereum standards by supporting native mobile signing methods such as Passkey and facial recognition. What does this mean? Users can now sign transactions directly using their phone’s biometric features without needing to remember private keys or use hardware wallets. This significantly improves user experience, especially for Web3 newcomers, lowering the barrier to entry.

Stablecoins as Gas tokens, simplifying payment processes

For custom Arbitrum chains, the upgrade simplifies the process of using USDC or USDT as native Gas tokens. This improvement allows application chains built by developers to enable users to pay Gas fees directly with stablecoins, without first converting to ETH. It is particularly friendly for payment-oriented applications.

Resource tracking refinement, laying the groundwork for future scalability

The upgrade provides more detailed tracking of computational and storage resource usage, laying a foundation for increasing network throughput in the future. This is a long-term optimization direction, making Arbitrum’s scaling roadmap clearer.

Why is this upgrade critical

The importance of timing

This week’s large ARB unlock pressure makes launching a major upgrade at this point a demonstration of Arbitrum’s confidence in its ecosystem. The substantive improvements brought by the upgrade help offset potential negative sentiment caused by the unlock.

Perspective on ecosystem competition

Currently, the Layer 2 race is highly competitive, with Optimism, Base, and others optimizing user experience. Arbitrum, through the Dia upgrade, has enhanced multiple aspects such as gas fee stability, user friendliness, and developer support. While these improvements may seem like technical details, they directly impact the ecosystem’s attractiveness.

The context of cross-chain ecosystems

From related information, the Web3 ecosystem is facing challenges of liquidity fragmentation. As one of the mainstream L2 solutions, Arbitrum is optimizing its infrastructure to provide a more stable foundation for cross-chain aggregation, payment protocols, and other upper-layer applications. This is a bottom-up optimization logic.

Summary

The ArbOS Dia upgrade reflects Arbitrum’s ongoing iteration at the infrastructure level. From smoothing gas fee fluctuations and enhancing user experience to simplifying developer workflows and paving the way for future scaling, this upgrade covers three dimensions: users, developers, and the ecosystem. In the increasingly competitive L2 landscape, such upgrades are essential for Arbitrum to maintain its competitiveness. Future focus should be on whether these improvements can effectively reduce user costs in practice and whether they can attract more developers to build applications on Arbitrum.