Arbitrum Foundation Goes ‘Bigger’ with Road to Devcon in Asia

The Arbitrum Foundation announced the Road to Devcon initiative at a time when it is “doubling down” on Asia's potential for rapid growth.

The foundation announced a three-pronged campaign ahead of DevCon 2024 in Bangkok, citing factors including the region's growing developer community and increasing retail crypto adoption.

A pair of face-to-face Arbylink events in Vietnam and Indonesia provide opportunities to connect with two of the fastest-growing local developer communities. From Github.

The “Step into Arbitrum” Learn and Discover campaign, meanwhile, invites participants to familiarize themselves with the Arbitrum SDK through five modules. A bounty campaign will follow in October inviting developers to test their knowledge of the Arbitrum SDK by developing a decentralized application (DAP).

Arbitrum's path to Devcon initiatives will follow in the second half of the year after they are rolled out across Asia. Arbitrum's first night in Tokyo included 15 games and NFT projects built on the chain, a co-branded booth with ApeChain, and Arbitrum's first C-level roundtable hosting leaders from the Korean business community at Korea Blockchain Week. The foundation hosted its first ArbiVerse event at the ArtScience Museum in Singapore, featuring 11 hand-picked partners including Ubisoft, Azuki and ApeChain.

At the event, Arbitrum was joined by Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin for a podcast look at Ethereum's lineup, who argued, “There's a lot of value in testing custom features in Layers 2 – and things like Arbitrum's stylus are a good example of that. He said.

Launched at Korea Blockchain Week, Arbitrum Stylus is a flexible, customized programming environment intended for Web2 developers in Asia to build and deploy Web3 applications to meet the needs of both Asian and global markets. To this end, ArbitrumCN has partnered with the local developer community to launch technical workshops focused on educating developers about Arbitrum technologies, including Stylus and Orbit, to enable custom-designed Layer 3 businesses to deploy their own blockchains.

They are part of a technology stack that includes Arbitrum's Arbitrum One Blockchain Infrastructure and Arbitrum Nova Infrastructure.

Asia's fastest growing blockchain

Arbitrum's decision to make it “big” in Asia is due to the region's rapid growth in the blockchain space, according to the Arbitrum Foundation.

As well as the region's rapidly growing developer community and crypto adoption rates, the foundation is fueling blockchain growth in Asia with increasing internet and smartphone penetration (to reach 90 percent by 2025, according to Statista), favorable regulatory trends and positive macro-economic indicators.

“The APAC region remains a key focus in H2 2024, and we believe it will play a critical role in expanding our growth globally,” Takamasa Minami, head of marketing at Arbitrum Foundation, told Decrypt. “The level of energy and creativity from the developers and community has inspired us to accelerate our commitment to lead Ethereum expansion efforts around the world.”

Regulators in the region are issuing clear guidelines for crypto, such as Singapore's stablecoin regime and the crypto-friendly regulatory framework established by Thailand's SEC earlier this year.

In Singapore, users are now able to make payments in Bitcoin, Ether, local currency stablecoin XSGD, USDC and Tether for many startups and enterprises, the total value of crypto received by merchant services in the country touched 1 billion dollars in the second quarter. 2024. “This trend of crypto payments is interesting in a market where retail fiat payment systems are already very efficient, as evidenced by the ubiquity of crypto holdings among the public,” said the spokesperson of the Arbitrum Foundation Decrypt.

Broader macroeconomic indicators will further boost growth in Asia, with five emerging Asian countries expected to have the highest real GDP growth in 2024, according to Euromonitor International's Macro Model.

Ranked number five in Asia in Henley's Crypto-Adoption Index 2024, Arbitrum Foundation “will enable architects, developers and founders in Asia to seamlessly stack their solutions with Web3 technology,” a spokesperson said.