Builder's Block #022: Arbitrum’s Mid-Year Recap & New Stylus Hardhat Plugin

📣 Announcements

Key updates from the Arbitrum ecosystem and Foundation.

Arbitrum H1 2026: The Programmable Economy is Accelerating

H1 2026 was defined by momentum. Across ecosystem growth, institutional adoption, and landmark launches such as Robinhood Chain mainnet, Arbitrum strengthens its position as the finance-native platform with enterprise-grade infrastructure to power the programmable economy.

Hardhat 3 Plugin Suite for Arbitrum Stylus

@cobuildersxyz went live with their Hardhat 3 plugin suite. Developers can now compile, test and deploy Rust and Solidity smart contracts together in the Hardhat plugin suite with one single command.

📚 Learn & Build

New learning drops and hands-on resources from across the Arbitrum ecosystem.

How Robinhood Chain Apps Can Simplify Wallet Funding With ZeroDev Smart Routing Address

Building on Robinhood Chain?

ZeroDev Smart Routing Address gives each user one deposit address, routes supported funds into the right smart account, and reduces manual bridge-and-transfer friction.

Fund once. Stay in-app. Activate faster.

Build Your First Robinhood Chain App

Robinhood Chain lets developers build with the same EVM tools and workflows they already know: Solidity contracts, Foundry deploys, Viem reads, Wagmi writes, ERC-20 approvals.

Here's how to build your first Robinhood Chain app by Ben Greenberg

A Beginners Guide to Privacy Onchain 

As more financial applications move onchain, privacy will become essential for adoption at scale. This beginner-friendly guide breaks down how zero-knowledge proofs work, why they matter, and how they could enable a more private, scalable future for blockchain applications.

Robinhood Chain for Ethereum Developers - what you need to know

Layer 2s like Robinhood are EVM-Compatible, but there are a handful of semantic changes we need to consider when deploying contracts across multiple chains. 

This article is a list of considerations for Ethereum developers deploying to Robinhood.

🔦 Ecosystem Highlights

Fresh launches and standout threads from around the Arbitrum ecosystem.

How WalletConnect brings connectivity to payments in Arbitrum

WalletConnect brings connectivity to Arbitrum payments by enabling businesses to integrate with the largest network of digital wallets through a single, future-proof integration. Learn how PSPs and merchants can access Arbitrum's settlement rails without building custom integrations across chains and assets.

Total RWA Value on Arbitrum Hits $900 million

The tokenization of real-world assets continued to gain momentum, with total RWA value on Arbitrum surpassing $900 million. As institutions increasingly explore onchain finance, Arbitrum remains at the forefront of powering the programmable economy.

Sedona Launches on Arbitrum

Privacy-first neobank Sedona is bringing private payments, markets, and financial services to Arbitrum. Discover why Sedona chose Arbitrum as the foundation to scale its vision of a new kind of onchain banking experience.

Bitget Wallet X Integrates Arbitrum

Bitget Wallet X, Bitget Wallet’s developer infrastructure stack, has integrated Arbitrum to help developers and applications access deeper onchain liquidity, market data, and infrastructure across ecosystems. 

🛠️ Dev Tooling & Infra

Updates to SDKs, CLIs, and developer workflows across the stack.

How ZeroDev Simplifies Wallet, Gas, & Cross-Chain Friction

If you’re spending time solving wallet onboarding, gas management, or cross-chain UX, this is worth a read. Explore how @zerodev_app’s account infrastructure stack can help simplify these challenges for applications built on the Arbitrum Platform.

In addition, teams building on Arbitrum can now get 3 months of @zerodev_app Growth Plan: 100,000 credits, Gas sponsorship, Bundler infrastructure.

Use code: ARBZERODEV

Arbitrum Nova Minimization

If you're still building or holding funds on Arbitrum Nova, now's the time to act.

We are currently halfway through the 90-day migration window, during which time developers and users are encouraged to migrate from Arbitrum Nova to Arbitrum One.

Learn more here. 👇🏻

🗓️ Events

Workshops, hackathons, and ecosystem meetups to watch.

Aftermovie: Founder House London 

Open House London ended with an incredible 3-days of shipping on the Arbitrum Platform: $300K in prizes and grants, 140 founders from across the globe, & 15+ financial products out of stealth

Here's what went down 👇🏻

Follow @ArbitrumDevs & stay tuned for the full recap.

🧵 Forum & Community Discussions

What builders are debating and proposing this week.

[RFC] New state representation for Arbitrum: proof-format change and request for feedback

Offchain is researching a change to how Arbitrum commits to its state: replacing the Merkle-Patricia Trie (MPT) with a new verifiable data structure (plus auxiliary verifiable structures). The primary motivation for this change is to scale Arbitrum chains to new heights that optimizing the MPT cannot alone achieve.

Arbitrum Growth Circles: Final Report

AGC Cohort 1 was ran as a go-to-market bootcamp for early-stage DeFi teams building toward regulated, institution-facing use cases, organized around a shared cohort thesis - custodians as a distribution channel for DeFi protocols rather than generic startup support. This report closes out the program’s final milestone, summarizing what the cohort delivered and what was learned.

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