Arbitrum Stylus SDK v0.10 Brings Standard Rust Workspace Support to Multi-Contract Development
By Verse Press Staff | March 6, 2026
The Arbitrum Foundation published a technical guide on March 4 detailing how developers can structure multi-contract projects using version 0.10 of the Stylus Rust SDK. Released on January 12, 2026, the update gives Rust developers building on Arbitrum the ability to manage several smart contracts inside a single Cargo workspace, a project layout that Rust engineers already use in everyday software development. The change significantly reduces two specific friction points that have existed since Stylus launched on mainnet: the need to copy shared data types across separate projects, and the burden of manually encoding ABI data for cross-contract calls.
What changed and why it matters
Stylus is Arbitrum's framework for writing smart contracts in languages that compile to WebAssembly (WASM), primarily Rust. WASM contracts run alongside traditional Solidity contracts on Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova and can call each other without modification. The performance case for WASM is concrete: decentralized oracle network RedStone benchmarked its Stylus implementation and recorded roughly 26 percent lower gas costs overall versus its EVM equivalent, with 34 to 50 percent reductions on pure computation tasks. For compute-heavy operations such as cryptographic hashing and big-integer arithmetic, WASM execution is 10 to 100 times faster than its EVM equivalent.
Before v0.10, building a system with two or more Stylus contracts was awkward. Each contract lived in a separate Cargo project, so sharing data types between contracts meant duplicating code by hand. Calling one contract from another required developers to manually encode raw ABI data, a step that introduced risk of encoding errors.
The new workspace model removes both problems. Developers now define two root-level configuration files: a root Cargo.toml listing all contracts as workspace members, and a root Stylus.toml marked [workspace]. Each contract also receives its own Stylus.toml marked [contract]. Shared types live in a common library crate that every contract in the workspace can reference.
Cross-contract calls have also been simplified. Developers define the interface of one contract as a Rust trait using the #[public] attribute, and when the contract-client-gen feature flag is enabled during compilation, the SDK generates type-safe client proxies that handle ABI encoding automatically. The SDK also determines whether a call should be read-only or state-modifying based on how the function is declared, removing another manual decision point.
One important constraint to know: unit tests must include a feature guard in their configuration because the same feature flag that generates client proxies strips out storage types and the contract entry point. Developers who miss this detail will see their tests fail in non-obvious ways.
The Foundation also published a companion repository containing a working example: a two-contract voting application consisting of a voter registry and a polls manager. The example demonstrates the complete workspace pattern from project layout through cross-contract calls, including the cross-contract call convention using self.vm() and Call::new().
On-chain context
Arbitrum holds roughly 35 percent of layer-2 total value locked and carries an estimated TVL of around $2.62 billion as of the time of writing. These figures are volatile and should be verified against DeFiLlama before being relied upon. The ARB token was trading near $0.10 at the time of writing, though the price is highly volatile and should be confirmed against CoinMarketCap or CoinGecko at the time of reading.
The Stylus SDK repository on GitHub had accumulated 320 stars and 118 forks across 1,173 commits as of March 2026, with 92.7 percent of the code written in Rust. More than 17,000 contracts have been deployed to Stylus testnets since the framework launched. This figure reflects cumulative testnet deployments across the full history of Stylus predating SDK v0.10, and does not represent activity specific to the new release. A verified mainnet-specific count is not publicly available.
Developer interest has outpaced available funding in grant programs. The Stylus Sprint, a 5 million ARB grant initiative, received 147 submissions that the Foundation described as high-quality, requesting a combined 32 million ARB, more than six times the available budget.
Regional picture: South Asia leads documented adoption
India has emerged as the most clearly documented growth market for Stylus outside the United States. The Arbitrum Foundation described India as its fastest-growing hub for Web3 talent and ran a dedicated learning program that drew more than 550 participants into Stylus and Orbit tracks. A Hacker House event in Bengaluru attracted roughly 500 applications for just over 100 spots, with a $70,000 prize pool.
The winning project, Orbital AMM, used Stylus specifically for its high-precision math layer, a direct application of WASM's computational advantages in DeFi. Second place went to Shinobi.Cash ($20,000). Third place went to GuardChain.ai ($10,000), an insurance platform built for India's gig workers. GuardChain.ai illustrates how Stylus's computational efficiency can serve locally specific needs in a country with one of the world's largest informal labor markets. The SDK v0.10 workspace improvements are particularly relevant for engineers in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Pune, where Rust is already common in fintech and systems software roles. Structuring a Stylus project now maps closely to how those engineers already organize Rust microservices.
No Africa-specific Stylus program data was available in public sources at the time of writing. That said, the Stylus Sprint accepted global applications, and Rust is gaining ground in Nigeria's and Kenya's tech sectors. Stylus's lower gas costs are a practical advantage in regions where transaction economics are a primary adoption barrier, making the framework directly relevant to developers building for cost-sensitive user bases. The Speedrun Stylus platform, which offers more than 10 self-paced coding challenges funded through an Arbitrum DAO grant, is accessible to developers regardless of location or time zone.
What comes next
The Foundation has indicated it plans to replicate the India program model in North America, suggesting emerging-market developer communities are a deliberate strategic focus rather than a secondary consideration. OpenZeppelin is also extending its Contracts library and Defender security tooling to cover Stylus, which would bring enterprise-grade security infrastructure to Rust-based projects. For developers ready to start building, the SDK v0.10 documentation and example repository are available now on the Arbitrum Foundation blog and GitHub.