Arbitrum’s Elara Upgrade Goes Live: 4x Bigger Stylus Contracts and Opt-In Compliance Screening

In Brief:

• Following a constitutional ArbitrumDAO vote, ArbOS 61 — codenamed “Elara” — switched on across Arbitrum One and Nova on Aug. 20 at 17:00 UTC.
• The compressed code ceiling for Stylus contracts jumps from 24 KB to 96 KB, while dedicated chains pick up opt-in compliance filtering at the protocol layer, configurable priority fees, and an alternative data availability interface.
• Those chain-owner tools land squarely on the tier where most Arbitrum gaming networks live — Xai, Sanko and Proof of Play Apex among them.

Arbitrum switched on ArbOS 61, known as Elara, across Arbitrum One and Nova on Aug. 20 at 17:00 UTC, lifting the Stylus contract size cap by a factor of four and giving dedicated chain operators a toolkit they previously lacked.

Approved as a constitutional AIP, the release had already been live on Arbitrum Sepolia ahead of the mainnet switch.

Compliance filtering arrives at the protocol level

Transaction screening is now baked directly into the node software as an optional feature. Arbitrum One and Nova ship with it turned off; the intended audience is operators of dedicated chains carrying regulatory obligations in their own jurisdictions. From the moment the upgrade activated, chain owners were able to configure it.

The screening happens at two separate points. Inside the sequencer, a Compliance Rules Engine simulates every transaction prior to sequencing and rejects anything that breaks the rules, so violations never make it into a block. The state transition function houses the second checkpoint, which picks up transactions routed in via the parent chain’s Delayed Inbox and fails them at execution — shutting the force-inclusion path that would otherwise bypass the sequencer.

Which addresses count as restricted is determined by an external provider that chain owners plug in; Arbitrum’s documentation points to TRM Labs and Chainalysis as examples. Screening nodes keep the resulting list in memory, stored as salted hashes in the form sha256(salt || address), with periodic refreshes.

Stylus gets four times the room

For game developers, the Stylus revision is the change that bites first. The cap on compressed contract code moves from 24 KB to 96 KB, dissolving the limit that had forced teams to fragment their logic across several deployments.

Elara additionally lifts the WASM size ceiling and alters WASM multi-value support — a change the proposal warned could have consequences for contracts already deployed. An updated Stylus Rust SDK shipped in tandem.

Running alongside the EVM, Stylus is the execution path for Rust, C and C++, and roomier contracts are precisely what studios need for the compute-intensive game logic they have been attempting to move on chain.

Fees and data availability

Multidimensional gas pricing arrives with Elara, along with a new BaseFeeManager contract. Under the DAO vote, Offchain Labs gains a two-year mandate to adjust the minimum L2 base fee on Arbitrum One and Nova anywhere inside a band running from 0.01 gwei to 0.10 gwei inclusive.

Operators of dedicated chains can now set priority fees themselves. Turning on priority fee collection for Arbitrum One is a separate matter entirely and would need additional ArbitrumDAO votes.

Also included: an optional alternative data availability interface for dedicated chains, plus fixes for gas refund logic errors inherited from ArbOS 51 — codenamed Dia — the release Elara is built on top of.

Where this lands for games

The bulk of Arbitrum’s gaming activity happens on dedicated chains. Xai, Sanko and Proof of Play Apex — the latter built by the studio behind Pirate Nation — are all Orbit framework deployments running their own gas tokens and fee parameters. When activity spikes, priority fee configuration and base fee tuning are exactly the dials those operators reach for to hold transaction costs steady.

The Arbitrum Foundation’s Gaming Catalyst Program, backed by 200 million ARB, has already pushed out an initial $10 million tranche to studios such as Wildcard, Xai and Pirate Nation.

On the question of who compliance filtering is meant for, the documentation leaves no ambiguity. The feature, it states, isn’t intended for use by Arbitrum One; bundling it into Elara canonicalizes it within the node software and simplifies the codebase. The framing is that the platform is answering the needs of teams with obligations to comply with regulatory frameworks in their respective jurisdictions.

Ahead of Thursday’s activation, node operators needed to be running Nitro v3.11.3 or newer. Anyone on an older build dropped out of consensus.