Arbitrum Testnet Guide

Eigen Network
4 min readAug 18, 2021

Hey friends, if you are an investor and are interested in digging high quality projects, you must always keep an ear out for news from blockchain.

Do you know the upgrade, called London, includes Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559?

Do you know the popular solutions of ETH2?

Do you know the Arbitrum Rollup, a new star project among those solutions?

And the launch of Arbitrum’s token? Lol, just kidding, forgive me!

The Arbitrum protocol’s ability to pass messages between L1 and L2 can be leveraged to trustlessly move assets from Ethereum to an Arbitrum chain and back. Any asset / asset type can in principle be bridged, including Ether, ERC20 tokens, ERC-721 tokens, etc.

So today we are going to show you actually how to use the testnet, so that when the mainnet does come, you’ll be ready to go since the process will be fairly similar in that.

1 The Information You need to know

  1. You will need Chrome Browser, and install Metamask for Chrome .
  2. Arbitrum Bridge: https://bridge.arbitrum.io/
  3. Add the Arbitrum testnet by clicking on the top right dropdown and selecting ‘Custom RPC’ and Create the custom testnet by providing the Arbitrum Testnet details:

2 Get ETH from Rinkeby

  • Make sure you are using the Rinkeby network.
  • Get Ether on Rinkeby Authenticated Faucet.
  • To request funds via Twitter, make a tweet with your Ethereum address pasted into the contents. Copy-paste the tweets URL into the above input box and fire away!

3 Deposit & Withdraw

On L2, the paired contract behaves much like a normal ERC20 token contract.

Now we already have Ethers arrived in our wallet, the next step is move Ether from Rinkeby onto the Arbitrum Testnet.

  • Go to the ‘Arbitrum Token Bridge’ page, enter an amount to transfer (e.g. 3), and click on the ‘Deposit’ button:
  • A MetaMask wallet window will pop-up, giving you an overview of the transaction. Click ‘Confirm’. Now your Arbitrum address should have ETH.
  • As we can see from the screenshot above, we can only deposit when we are using Rinkbey(L1) and the withdraw button is dark.
  • Depositing a token entails escrowing some amount of the token in an L1 bridge contract, and minting the same amount at the paired token contract on L2. Hence there are two TxID deposits.
  • Upon withdrawing, the Ether balance is burnt on the Arbitrum side, and will later be made available on the Ethereum side. This will take more time than a deposit.

4 Using the Dapps on Testnet

So now that we finally have some funds on the Arbitrum from Rinkeby testnet. We can finally start tinkering with some different dapps that are available.

Check out here: https://portal.arbitrum.one/

All right guys, until mainnet doesn’t come out, I do highly recommend you take some time to hang on the testnet and enjoy the bridging between L1 and L2.

About Eigen Network

Eigen is the first private computing network on Layer 2. Powered by the FL and Hardware-software synergy, moving value from web2.0 to web3.0, by building a new creator economy.

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