Arbitrum Foundation to ‘Go Big’ in Asia With Road to Devcon

The Arbitrum Foundation has announced its Road to Devcon initiative as it “doubles down” on Asia’s potential for rapid growth.

Pointing to factors including the region’s burgeoning developer community and increasing rates of retail crypto adoption, the Foundation announced a three-pronged campaign ahead of Devcon 2024 in Bangkok.

A pair of face-to-face ArbiLink events in Vietnam and Indonesia will provide opportunities to connect with two of the fastest-growing local developer communities, where developer numbers have grown by 31% and 34% year-on-year respectively, per data from Github.

The “Step Into Arbitrum” Learn and Earn campaign, meanwhile, invites participants to familiarize themselves with the Arbitrum SDK through five modules. It will be followed in October by a bounty campaign that invites developers to put their Arbitrum SDK knowledge to the test by programming a decentralized application (dapp).

Arbitrum’s Road to Devcon initiative follows on the heels of appearances across Asia in the second half of the year. They included the first Arbitrum Night in Tokyo, which showcased 15 games and NFT projects building 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 also hosted its first ever ArbiVerse event at Art Science Museum in Singapore, showcasing 11 handpicked partners including Ubisoft, Azuki and ApeChain.

At the event, Arbitrum was joined by Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin for a podcast appearance on Ethereum alignment, where he argued that, “There's a lot of value in layer 2s experimenting with custom features—and things like Arbitrum Stylus are a good example of that.”

Launched at Korea Blockchain Week, Arbitrum Stylus is a flexible, custom programming environment for Web2 developers that’s intended to meet the needs of Asian developers to build and deploy Web3 applications for both the Asian and global market. To that end, ArbitrumCN is collaborating with local developer communities across the region to launch technical workshops focused on educating developers about Arbitrum technologies including Stylus and Orbit, its custom-designed layer 3s for businesses to deploy their own blockchains.

They’re part of a tech stack that also includes Arbitrum’s Arbitrum One blockchain infrastructure and Arbitrum Nova infrastructure that’s specifically designed for social and gaming applications.

Asia’s rapid blockchain growth

Arbitrum’s decision to “go big” in Asia is prompted by the region’s rapid growth in the blockchain space, according to the Arbitrum Foundation.

As well as the region’s fast-growing developer community and crypto adoption rates, the Foundation sees blockchain growth bolstered in Asia by increasing internet and smartphone penetration (set to hit 90% by 2025, per Statista), favorable regulatory trends and positive macro-economic indicators.

“The APAC region has been a key focus in H2 2024, and we believe it will play a pivotal role in expanding our growth internationally,” Takamasa Minami, Head of Marketing at Arbitrum Foundation, told Decrypt. “The level of energy and creativity from the builders and community has inspired us to accelerate our commitment to leading Ethereum scaling efforts worldwide.”

Regulators in the region are setting out 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 to many startups and enterprises, with the total value of crypto received by merchant services in the country touching $1 billion in the second quarter of 2024. “This trend of crypto payments is interesting in a market where retail fiat payment systems are already highly efficient, as it hints at the ubiquity of crypto holdings among the population,” a spokesperson for Arbitrum Foundation told Decrypt.

Further bolstering growth in Asia are broader macro-economic indicators, with five emerging Asian countries among those expected to have the highest real GDP growth rates for 2024, according to Euromonitor International’s Macro Model.

With five out of the top 10 crypto-friendly countries in the Henley Crypto-Adoption Index 2024 from Asia, the Arbitrum Foundation has zeroed in on the region with a view to “empowering builders, developers & founders in Asia to deploy their solutions on the Web3 technology stack seamlessly,” a spokesperson said.