Arbitrum Foundation Announces Major Asian Expansion Ahead of Devcon

The Arbitrum Foundation’s announcement of a major expansion initiative for Asia marks a bold step into the region as it helps underscore Asia’s fast growing role in the global blockchain landscape.

Unveiled right before Devcon 2024 in Bangkok, this strategic push is designed to ride the explosive developer talent and retail crypto adoption across Asia. Arbitrum’s comprehensive plan, aptly named the “Road to Devcon” campaign, is a major gear point in its global strategy and will fundamentally change the face of the blockchain within the continent. 

Arbitrums’ Strategic Asian Expansion Initiative

An ambitious expansion plan to Asia has been announced by the leading player in the blockchain space, Arbitrum Foundation, which is planning to venture into Asia’s crypto ecosystem. In anticipation of Devcon 2024, which will be held in Bangkok, this strategic move is called the “Road to Devcon” initiative.

The Asia region is becoming key to the future of blockchain technology and to drive this foundation looked to ‘double down’ on Asia given the region’s growing number of developers and rising rates of crypto adoption, signaling the importance of the Asia region to the future of blockchain.

The key components at the heart of this expansion are three to promote and nurture participation from Asia’s crypto community. The foundation will then host two face to face ArbiLink events in Indonesia and Vietnam, countries where we have seen development communities grow rapidly.

Github data based on these countries shows year on year rate of increase in the numbers of developers of 31% and 34%. The purpose for these events is to bring these thriving ecosystems together to create valuable networking opportunities and build that much needed collaboration.

The ‘Step Into Arbitrum’ Learn and Earn campaign is the second prong of Arbitrum strategy. This is a five module educational initiative to get you familarized with the Arbitrum SDK (Software Development Kit).

Arbitrum inspires learning in hopes to grow its user base while building out a skilled community of developers that understands the technology. Then, in October, we will launch a bounty campaign enlisting developers to put their new gained skills to use by building decentralized Applications (dapps) with Arbitrum SDK so that every potential can be implemented practically of the platform’s capabilities.

Rationale and Regional Trends

The Arbitrum Foundation explains that the reason Arbitrum decided to ‘go big’ in Asia is that the region is growing rapidly in the blockchain space. Several key factors such as the region’s fast growing developer community and crypto adoption rate support the expansion.

In addition, the Foundation believes the push behind blockchain growth in Asia comes from continued internet and smartphone penetration that will reach 90 percent by 2025, according to Statista.

On top of that, there are favorable regulatory trends to blockchain expansion, and beneficial macro economic indicators for the region to expand further. For instance, users in Singapore can now make transactions using Bitcoin, Ethereum, local currency stablecoin XSGD, USDC, and Tether to many startups and enterprises.

In the second quarter of 2024, the country’s merchant services received a total value of crypto worth $1 billion, reflecting the growing incorporation of cryptocurrencies into the daily transactions.

The reason this trend of crypto payments is interesting is because markets such as Singapore are already very efficient with fiat payments in the retail sector.

The fact that more and more people use cryptocurrencies in such environments suggests that customers who engage in cryptocurrency holdings are widespread, fueling the Air market and the incredible potential for the Asian blockchain ecosystem.