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Arbitrum, Polygon and Optimism Show How To Start an X Feud in Four Easy Steps

The fight began, humorously enough, with a post about the need for Layer 2 blockchains to work together.
By: Leo Jakobson • January 29, 2025
Arbitrum, Polygon and Optimism Show How To Start an X Feud in Four Easy Steps

The latest feud in crypto started with a co-founder of Arbitrum developer Offchain Labs posting on X that most interoperability tech “is still in the ideas/vision/research phase.”

Steven Goldfeder then said that he believes most Ethereum developers limit their vision of interoperability to their own stack. “I think we need to change this now,” he said. “We need to build open bridges, not arbitrary walls.”

Which does not exactly sound like fighting words

It was fine until Jill Gunter, chief tactics officer of Espresso Systems, which works with Offchain Labs, threw some shade about Optimism Superchain’s focus on its own stack rather than the broader Ethereum ecosystem.

Saying “the tide is shifting,” Gunter commented that top Layer 2 (L2) teams “are starting to signal Ethereum-wide coordination and neutrality in earnest.

“Less Superchain, more Ethereum,” she added.

Angry Optimism

Optimism co-founder Jing Wang took exception to this.

Saying she “can’t be quiet about this,” Wang pointed to introducing “blobs” intended to reduce the strain on the Ethereum base chain to the Superchain. Blobs were introduced in Ethereum’s Dencun update and allow some data to be stored temporarily on the mainchain.

She also pointed to fully open-sourcing its code and donating millions of dollars a year to “public goods” for the Ethereum Layer 1.

“If there's more we could be doing to further lift the whole space up, I'd genuinely love to hear it,” Wang said. “We haven't gotten everything right as a team, but I can say that we at least put our money where our mouth is.”

Polygon Chimes In

Whereupon Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron chimed in by pointing to several open-source things Polygon does, and asked, “How is Superchain unifying Ethereum when it does not unify Arbitrum Orbit chains as an example?”

He added, “Doing things to help Ethereum so that you can help yourself [like implementing blobs] is different from just helping Ethereum.”

Wang replied, “What are Polygon and Arbitrum doing to help Ethereum that does not involve helping themselves?”

To which Boiron returned, “Nothing wrong with helping yourself as long as you don’t claim to be doing it for others.”

Brendan Farmer, a Polygon zero knowledge (ZK) developer, also replied to Wang’s question with a list of several things Polygon has done, starting with “Polygon spent a billion on ZK R&D, built the fastest ZK systems… and open-sourced them.”

Peacemaker

Others took up the argument on X, but Gunter came back around as the peacemaker, with a long post praising Wang and Optimism (OP).

“No one has their hearts more invested in building an open source, seamlessly interoperable, sustainable, and collaborative new version of the internet than the OP team and community,” she wrote.

She added that she had called out Superchain “as a sign of respect because the work that [the] OP team has done has made Superchain synonymous in people’s minds with rollup clusters.”

Gunter added: “None of us should be fighting turf wars. We can all tend the infinite garden together, in our own ways, in our own domains — and build for a unified Ethereum too.”

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