Arbitrum Nitro chains are Ethereum compatible, and therefore allow you to trustlessly deploy Solidity contracts (as well as Vyper or any other language that compiles to EVM bytecode).
Although Arbitrum supports Solidity code, there are differences in the effects of a few operations, including language features that don't make much sense in the Layer 2 context:
blockhash(x)
returns a cryptographically insecure, pseudo-random hash forx
within the rangeblock.number - 256 <= x < block.number
. Ifx
is outside of this range,blockhash(x)
will return0
. This includesblockhash(block.number)
, which always returns0
just like on Ethereum. The hashes returned do not come from L1.block.coinbase
returns zeroblock.difficulty
returns the constant 2500000000000000block.number
/block.timestamp
return an "estimate" of the L1 block number / timestamp at which the Sequencer received the transaction (see Time in Arbitrum)msg.sender
works the same way it does on Ethereum for normal L2-to-L2 transactions; for L1-to-L2 "retryable ticket" transactions, it will return the L2 address alias of the L1 contract that triggered the message. See retryable ticket address aliasing for more.