Glossary
Arbitrum Stylus
An upgrade to Arbitrum's Nitro stack that adds a WebAssembly virtual machine beside the EVM, letting developers write smart contracts in Rust, C, and C++.
Arbitrum Stylus extends the Nitro stack with a second, WebAssembly-based virtual machine that runs alongside the EVM on the same chain. Developers can write contracts in any language that compiles to WASM — Rust, C, and C++ are the first-class targets — and deploy them next to ordinary Solidity contracts.
Because WASM executes faster and uses memory more efficiently than the EVM, Stylus contracts can be far cheaper for compute- and memory-heavy work such as cryptography, signature verification, or custom precompiles. Both VMs share the same accounts, storage, and tooling, so a Rust contract and a Solidity contract can call each other with full interoperability.