Arbitrum Reboots Odyssey Campaign As Rival Layer 2s Gain Ground

Arbitrum, the largest Ethereum Layer 2, has relaunched its Odyssey campaign in a bid to attract new users.

The rebooted Odyssey campaign is designed to onboard users through a seven-week campaign exploring 13 of Arbitrum’s top protocols and communities. Participants can collect 16 NFT badges by completing various tasks.

Odyssey follows the success of the promotional “Onchain Summer” campaign from Base, Coinbase’s recently launched Layer 2, and Optimism’s OP Summer last year.

While Arbitrum has long controlled more than 50% of Ethereum’s Layer 2 ecosystem when measured by total value locked (TVL), rival networks zkSync Era, Base, and recently, Starknet, have overtaken it in terms of throughput.

Arbitrum hosted 15.9M transactions over the past 30 days, lagging behind zkSync Era with 30.6M, Base with 21.4M, and Starknet with 20M, according to L2beat.

However, activity on ZkSync Era and Starknet is likely exaggerated by opportunistic airdrop hunters farming transactions on the networks. Earlier this month, blockchain sleuths identified an entity controlling nearly 22,000 wallets on zkSync Era that had deployed a closed token and decentralized exchange to artificially generate on-chain activity.

Arbitrum first launched Odyssey in June of last year but halted the campaign after transaction fees spiked higher than Ethereum’s amid the surge in activity.

The Arbitrum Foundation lamented that the Arbitrum network only offered around the same capacity as the Ethereum mainnet when Odyssey first launched. The team then chose to halt the campaign until the completion of its Nitro upgrade — which has increased throughput by seven times.

Odyssey’s first week will focus on the GMX decentralized exchange, which supports both spot and perpetuals markets. Other spotlighted projects include Uniswap, the leading DEX, Handle Fi, a decentralized FX protocol, tofuNFT, a multi-chain NFT marketplace, and BattleFly, a play-to-earn strategy game.

The Arbitrum Foundation stressed that Odyssey participants will not qualify for any future airdrops.

Arbitrum’s native ARB token is down 1% over the past 24 hours.