Tried out the Arbitrum Layer 2 tonight.

I basically only stake ETH using Lido built into Ledger Live. During low gas times (around 20gwei) you can stake with Lido using Ledger live for about $6 - $8 in gas fees.

The research I have been doing says I need to move to an L2 as most of retail will only use those in the future.

I decided to give it a try tonight.

I transferred $100 to my Ledger Nano S+ and connected it to MetaMask. I then went to Arbitrums site and deposited the $100 of ETH into the L2 using the bridge. Gas was around $7 (22 Gwei) at the time. So I ended up with $93.

That was successful and I now show $93 of ETH on the Arbitrum network on my Ledger connected to MetaMask.

I then went to Uniswap, connected my wallet to the Arbitrum network and swapped ETH for rETH. The fee was only $0.65. It would have been $24 if I had done it on the mainnet. So 36x cheaper than the Ethereum mainnet.

So this may not have been the best test as I could have staked with Lido for roughly the same gas fees and it’s much easier using the ledger live interface, but I wanted to learn how to move to an layer 2.

It does get me very excited for the potential of the ethereum ecosystem when Layer 2s are the go to for retail investors and we don’t have to interact with the layer 1 directly anymore.

It’s obviously still early days and it’s needs to be a little easier before mass adoption happens, but I know that will come in time.

I really like that I can still do it all using my Ledger and not have to give up on using a hardware wallet.

That’s my story for my fun filled Saturday night!