In mid-May of this year, the Erigon and the Arbitrum Foundation announced a partnership aimed at providing the ecosystem with an alternative client implementation for cost benefits, client diversity, and operational improvements. The goal is to make it easier and more affordable for developers and infrastructure providers to run and scale nodes, benefiting the entire Arbitrum community. We are happy to share the first details on our progress.
How Erigon 3 Enhances Scalability on Arbitrum
Erigon 3 is built with a transaction-first architecture, processing the chain at the level of individual transactions rather than whole blocks. This makes it a natural fit for Arbitrum, where the sequencer streams transactions rather than pre-assembled blocks. After execution, a transaction can emit additional transactions that must be executed or scheduled before the next “block start” transaction arrives.
Looking ahead, this approach could pave the way for new scaling techniques, smarter scheduling algorithms, and finer-grained parallelism, further enhancing the network’s efficiency and performance.
Archive Node made smaller than state growth
At ErigonTech, we are committed to delivering robust results. Our expertise lies in compressing extensive data into compact, laptop-optimized workloads, making us a leader in the field. Arbitrum integration is built on top of the Erigon client, inheriting its data model, the improved staged-sync execution pipeline at its core, and the snapshot delivery mechanism known as OtterSync. The integration process started with a Arbitrum Sepolia testnet.
We estimate that state growth for Nitro Sepolia rollup snapshots is approximately 700 GB per month (source), while Arbitrum One’s is about 850GB per month (source).
Recent execution results shown that our prototype Erigon Nitro running an Arbitrum Sepolia archive node was shrunk from 12TB (source) to 732GB, achieving a 94% reduction, making its size smaller than the actual monthly state growth. A minimal Erigon Nitro Sepolia node with no history (set using the –prune.mode=minimal option) requires 208 GB of storage. Arbitrum One’s development is currently underway, and we anticipate achieving results that are comparable to those on the mainnet.
Given these small snapshots and the embedded OtterSync feature potentially allow node operators to bootstrap an Arbitrum Sepolia archive node in a matter of hours, depending on network throughput. In case of node failure – we got your back: it is no longer necessary to perform a full resync. Using Erigon tooling, administrators can reset the most recent execution progress and start over from a recent block.
Our Roadmap to Full Arbitrum Support
We are working hard to deliver full Arbitrum support:
- 2025 Q4: Stable Sepolia-rollup RPC and execution client.
- 2026 Q1: Basic support for Arbitrum One.
- 2026 Q3: Full prover support, completing our Arbitrum integration.
While this is a v0.1 alpha release, we encourage you to test it on the Sepolia testnet and provide feedback on our Discord. Your input is crucial for us to refine our solution and ensure a seamless experience. Visit our HackMD for technical instructions on how to run a Erigon Nitro node for Arbitrum Sepolia.
