Web3 development platform thirdweb has shipped production smart contracts built on Arbitrum Stylus, a virtual machine layer that lets developers write onchain code in Rust, C, and C++ rather than Solidity. The integration, detailed in an October 2025 Arbitrum blog post, delivers measurable gas reductions on airdrop and token distribution operations running on Arbitrum One and Nova.

The Developer Supply Problem Behind the Integration

Approximately 20,000 developers worldwide write protocol-level code in Solidity, the dominant language for Ethereum smart contracts. Rust alone counts roughly 2.267 million active developers, according to the 2024 State of Rust Survey, a pool more than 113 times larger. That gap has long been cited as a structural ceiling on how fast the onchain application ecosystem can expand, a conclusion drawn from the scale of the developer supply difference rather than any single source.

Stylus, which launched on Arbitrum One and Nova mainnets on September 3, 2024, addresses that ceiling directly. It adds a second virtual machine alongside the existing Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), accepting WebAssembly bytecode compiled from Rust, C, or C++. Contracts written in either environment can call each other directly, so teams building new projects do not need to abandon existing Solidity code.

What thirdweb Built and How Much It Saves

thirdweb deployed Stylus-powered airdrop contracts covering the three major token standards: ERC-20 for fungible tokens, ERC-721 for non-fungible tokens, and ERC-1155 for multi-token contracts. The contracts handle bulk distributions, Merkle-proof-based eligibility claims (a method for verifying which addresses qualify without storing every one of them onchain), and EIP-712 signed distributions (a structured signature format that adds a security layer to off-chain authorization). Stylus-based Merkle computations reduce gas costs by roughly 10 percent compared to an equivalent Solidity contract. For large push-based airdrops, where a contract sends tokens to many addresses in one transaction, the savings can reach 500,000 gas per transaction.

Those figures fit a broader performance picture. Arbitrum's own documentation states that Stylus compute costs run 10 to 100 times lower than Solidity in most contexts, and memory costs are 100 to 500 times lower due to an exponential rather than quadratic memory pricing model. An OpenZeppelin technical study found a Poseidon hash function (commonly used in zero-knowledge cryptography) costs 11,887 gas when implemented in optimized Rust versus 220,244 gas in plain Solidity, a reduction of roughly 94 percent. WellDone Studio benchmark testing found average gas costs running about 86 percent below equivalent Solidity contracts.

Engineer Yash Kumar of thirdweb described the shift this way: "Stylus enhances and transforms the developer experience with language interoperability, performant execution, and cost-efficient tools."

What Lower Gas Costs Mean for Emerging Markets

Gas fees are not abstract. Every transaction on a blockchain network carries a real cost, and in markets where incomes are lower and crypto serves practical financial needs rather than speculative ones, those costs determine which products are viable. Seven of the top 20 countries in global crypto adoption rankings are in Southeast Asia, a region where cross-border payments and remittances drive adoption. Sub-Saharan Africa ranks as the third-fastest growing crypto region globally. Nigeria accounts for 3.8 percent of total global Web3 contributors and ranks third worldwide for Web3 developer growth in 2025.

South Asia represents another significant node in this picture. India in particular hosts one of the world's largest systems programming communities and ranks among the top five countries globally for Rust developer activity. The country's established IT outsourcing sector, centered on cities such as Bangalore and Mumbai, gives developers there immediate pathways to apply Stylus skills in commercial onchain work. As in other emerging regions, lower gas costs reduce the operational barriers for teams building user-facing products on constrained budgets.

For teams in these regions building on thirdweb, the gas savings from Stylus arrive through the platform's pre-built contract infrastructure without requiring anyone to write Rust. For a play-to-earn game distributing tokens in Lagos or a community treasury running airdrops in Nairobi, removing 500,000 gas from a single transaction reduces the operational cost of those programs in a direct and practical way. The USD equivalent of that saving fluctuates with Arbitrum network conditions; the figure can be calculated against prevailing gwei rates via Arbiscan at time of publication. thirdweb's platform supports deployment across more than 2,000 EVM-compatible chains and its wallet infrastructure covers more than 350 wallet providers, securing over $100 billion in crypto assets.

One important caveat: neither thirdweb nor Arbitrum have published verified region-specific adoption figures for Africa or South Asia. The regional impact described here is inferred from broader ecosystem trends and platform design features.

What Is Still in Development

thirdweb has also released full tooling support and template contracts for Stylus. The team is currently building zero-knowledge minting contracts on the same infrastructure. Zero-knowledge proofs (a cryptographic method for verifying information without exposing the underlying data) are computationally expensive under the standard EVM. Stylus's cost advantages are most pronounced in exactly that kind of workload. For builders working on identity verification, credential systems, or privacy-preserving financial products, particularly in markets where state-issued ID infrastructure is unreliable, ZK-based minting could become a practical building block that was previously too costly to deploy at scale. That work remains in progress and has not yet shipped.

Arbitrum itself held a peak of roughly $20 billion in total value locked (TVL) in 2025 and commands 37.1 percent of the Ethereum Layer 2 market, with more than 2.16 billion transactions processed to date. The Stylus Sprint grants program received 147 high-quality submissions requesting around 32 million ARB in funding, well beyond its initial 5 million ARB budget, a signal that developer interest in the technology extends well past any single integration.