The Arbitrum ecosystem enters a new stage, with an accelerating trend of institutional adoption.

In recent years, Arbitrum has not only continued to scale but has also entered a unique stage of ecological exploration, participating in a distinctive game. This evolution redefines the boundaries of cryptocurrency technology adoption: from the native stage of DeFi, to the gradual entry of institutions, and to the initial emergence of a financial system.

Arbitrum has entered a mature phase in the ecosystem, forming a comprehensive and mature market layout in the DeFi sector. Currently, it has achieved several key milestones:

• Spot DEX: Steadily ranks first in accumulated trading volume on L2, reaching 53.42 billion USD.
• Perpetual Contracts: Total trading volume reached $802 billion, a historical high.
• Lending services: liquidity depth exceeds $1.2 billion, enhancing productivity scale through credit.
• RWA-Fi: Grew to a historical peak of $262.5 million, covering 20 assets

Arbitrum's self-sustaining growth is reflected in three aspects: strong user growth, deep liquidity, and the continuous activity of various business lines.

In the third quarter of 2021, during the early stages of the virtual automated market maker (vAMM), Arbitrum established the foundational layout for perpetual contract DEX. Now, user growth has entered a stable and mature phase, with high user retention rates clearly evidenced in the daily trading volume trend:

• Since the third quarter of 2023, the daily trading volume has achieved an approximately 3-fold increase (from 1 billion to 4 billion USD)
• Cumulative trading volume reached 802.5 billion dollars

Since then, the perpetual DEX ecosystem has achieved diversified evolution, with professional players continuously emerging, such as native cryptocurrency interest rate derivatives, ultra-high leverage trading, and multi-asset allocation coverage. The ecosystem demonstrates a parallel trend of high user engagement and product innovation, validating its sustainable nature of self-reliance and dynamic evolution.

As of the third quarter of 2024, the total locked value (TVL) of Arbitrum's RWA-Fi sector has grown to a historical peak of $262.7 million. The support from a diverse and growing global pool of fund participants further solidifies Arbitrum's position in the enterprise-level tokenization DeFi space. Notably, the $EUTBL issued by Spiko Finance has taken the lead in the EU bond tokenization market, capturing approximately 32% market share, surpassing several competitors. This indicates that institutional adoption is no longer just a theoretical phase.

The growing diversity within the Arbitrum sub-ecosystem deserves attention, spanning RWA integration and DeFi-native innovation. This fusion creates a rich landscape that meets various needs, including institutional allocators seeking compliant revenue-generating assets and crypto-native users chasing permissionless leverage, structured products, or long-tail yield strategies.

Arbitrum's Orbit and Stylus are becoming the core engines for growth across multiple domains, providing the ability to build dedicated chains for cross-industry vertical scenarios. Currently, the adoption rate of this technological framework is rapidly increasing:

• 83 official ecosystem partners
• 41 mainnet launched (32% increase since April 2024)
• 21 testnet + 21 in development
• The total locked value (TVL) of the Arbitrum ecosystem (excluding ArbitrumOne) exceeds 320 million USD.

Arbitrum is gaining increasing favor from large institutions, a trend supported by the dual validation of actual application needs and infrastructure-level developments. Several well-known global funds are building RWA-Fi liquidity, while multiple infrastructure projects are bridging real-world capital onto the blockchain. The ultimate issuance network of traditional finance is beginning to take shape, including institutional-level settlement layers and compliant chains suitable for the banking system.

The surge in MEV phenomena marks that the ecosystem is moving towards the next stage of mature development. Arbitrum's Timeboost auction mechanism introduces an efficient and fair competition model, perfectly mirroring the proposer-builder separation (PBS) model of the mainnet. Since its launch, the usage rate has been quite high, bringing considerable revenue to the DAO.

Interestingly, the Timeboost Fast Lane currently accounts for about 5% of the total transaction volume on Arbitrum, maintaining a steady upward trend since its launch. Even more noteworthy is the footprint of the trading volume: currently, approximately $175 million in daily trading volume comes from MEV arbitrage, accounting for 21.8% of the average daily trading volume on Arbitrum over the past month. This indicates that MEV has become a core engine driving substantial trading volume.

In the InfoFi application area, Arbitrum is gaining attention as a core ecosystem. The recent integration of the Yapper leaderboard with Kaito is a prominent example of this. The innovative forms of second-layer InfoFi are taking shape, such as Yapyo positioning itself as a decentralized consensus hub, merging social collaboration with incentive design.

Overall, Arbitrum has crossed a critical point and is entering a new stage of moving from DeFi to broader on-chain applications. Its maturity depth and evolution dynamics are clearly visible, proving that Arbitrum is charting a unique development path.