Building applications on the Ethereum blockchain today can be extremely challenging. The potential is unlimited, but the barriers are steep. Writing smart contracts requires a deep knowledge of Solidity, and to get started, teams need to create and maintain complex infrastructure such as wallets, RPC endpoints, storage and indexing. Once an application is live, scaling and retaining users means navigating high costs, complex integrations and security risks, leaving very few startups willing to take on the risk.

thirdweb seeks to remove those barriers, providing tools to anyone looking to build applications, games, and AI agents on blockchain without unnecessary complexity. 

What is thirdweb?

thirdweb is a web3 development platform that enables developers to easily spin up wallets, deploy secure and audited smart contracts, set up crypto payments, bridge assets across chains and query live onchain data without having to manage infrastructure or be a Solidity expert. This means that even non-crypto-native teams will easily be able to create reliable products on the blockchain. 

The team at thirdweb noticed that in the blockchain space, very few teams end up shipping applications. Many teams waste time reinventing common blockchain components such as token contracts, payment flows, and airdrop mechanics, and leave very little space for actual innovation.

How thirdweb is Building with Stylus

thirdweb and Arbitrum Stylus were a natural fit for each other, with both sharing the mission to make blockchain development more accessible. Stylus enables smart contracts to be written in Rust, C, C++, and other WebAssembly (WASM) languages while remaining completely EVM compatible, expanding the pool of developers who can write performant contracts. By integrating with Stylus, thirdweb was able to allow experienced teams to push onchain efficiency further on Arbitrum.

“Stylus enhances and transforms the developer experience with language interoperability, performant execution, and cost-efficient tools. These benefits make airdrops, proofs, and other contracts more efficient as the underlying tech for apps looking to scale,” Yash Kumar, engineer at thirdweb, said.

Using Stylus, thirdweb was able to design more efficient airdrop contracts that supported ERC-20, ERC-721, and ERC-1155 tokens across bulk airdrops, Merkle claims and signed airdrops using EIP-712. In each of these scenarios, Stylus has been able to handle the expensive work of hashing and proof verification, while token transfers used the standard EVM calls for composability. Stylus also enabled developers to import external Rust crates for math and cryptographic operations, and use strongly typed Rust traits for safer, easier cross-contract calls.

Stylus’s benefits are especially apparent in compute-heavy scenarios. thirdweb has observed meaningful gas savings with Stylus when running hashing, parsing, and Merkle proof verification inside contracts. Specifically, the team has seen around 10% gas savings on Merkle claim computations, up to half a million gas saved in large push-based airdrops, and cheaper EIP-712 hashing. Although storage I/O still dominates overall costs, Stylus has been able to deliver measurable efficiency gains. 

“We have seen gas savings on compute-heavy code that actually does work,” Kumar said. “This is where our Merkle verification and EIP-712 hashing benefit most.”

What’s Next for thirdweb?

thirdweb has already shipped full tooling support for Stylus, alongside template contracts and prebuilt airdrop flows. The team is currently working on zero-knowledge-based minting contracts and modular minting components, both of which will benefit from Stylus. 

Developers who are interested in deploying prebuilt Stylus contracts are encouraged to explore thirdweb’s docs. thirdweb is currently offering developers looking to build with Stylus one free month of its Growth Plan, with the promo code: STYLUS-GROWTH. Users can redeem this code on the thirdweb dashboard.