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Deploy Stylus Contracts on Arbitrum

Arbitrum Stylus brings a second, WebAssembly (WASM) virtual machine to every Arbitrum chain, so you can write contracts in Rust (or C/C++) while staying 100 % interoperable with existing Solidity code.

Under the hood, Stylus executes WASM thousands of times faster than the EVM, so transactions are metered in a new, much-smaller unit called ink rather than gas — translating to dramatic fee savings for compute- or memory-heavy logic. Learn more about Stylus on the Arbitrum documentation.

This tutorial will cover how to create a simple NFT template project with thirdweb CLI and deploy it to the Arbitrum network using Stylus. You can also follow this tutorial to deploy an ERC-20, ERC-1155, or Airdrop contract.

Benefits

  • Rust Tooling: Cargo, Clippy, unit tests, Rust crates, and the broader Rust ecosystem are at your disposal.
  • Ink-priced execution: Complex math, on-chain SVG generation, even lightweight ML models are suddenly affordable.
  • Opt-in re-entrancy protection: The Rust SDK disables re-entrancy by default; you only enable it when you really need it.
  • Multi-VM composability: Rust contract can call Solidity contracts (and vice-versa) without wrappers.

Prerequisites

  • Create a project on your thirdweb account
  • Install thirdweb CLI by running npm install -g thirdweb
  • Install Rust tool chain by running curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh or visit rust-lang.org
  • Install solc by running npm install -g solc or visit soliditylang.org
  • Install Node version 18 or higher

Scaffold an ERC-721 Stylus project

  • Initialize a new Stylus project

    In your CLI, create a new directory and run the following command to create a new stylus project:

    npx thirdweb create-stylus

    Select the ERC-721 template when prompted. This will scaffold a new Stylus project with a basic ERC-721 contract.

  • Set Collection Name & Symbol

    Open src/lib.rs and set the collection name and symbol. You may also tweak any other minting logic as well such as supply cap, roles, and fees.

  • Build & test the project

    Stylus compiles your Rust to WASM and generates an ABI JSON that thirdweb uses for the dashboard & SDK.

    Run the following command to build your project:

    cargo stylus build

    You can also run the following command to test your project:

    cargo test

  • Deploy or Publish Your Contract

    You can publish and deploy your project to Arbitrum. Publishing stores your contract metadata in thirdweb’s on-chain registry so anyone (including you) can deploy that exact version later with a few clicks.

    To publish your contract, ensure you have your thirdweb secret key from your created project, then run the following command:

    npx thirdweb publish-stylus -k YOUR_TW_SECRET_KEY

    If you'd prefer to just deploy a single instance of the contract without publishing, run the following command to deploy:

    npx thirdweb deploy-stylus -k YOUR_TW_SECRET_KEY

    Once the transaction confirms, the CLI will redirect you to the contract management dashboard where you can mint, transfer, view events, or pull ready-made SDK snippets.

  • (Optional) Mint NFTs Programmatically

    You can mint NFTs programmatically using the thirdweb SDKs. Use the following code snippet to mint NFTs:

    import {
      createThirdwebClient,
      getContract,
      sendTransaction,
    } from "thirdweb";
    import { arbitrumSepolia } from "thirdweb/chains";
    import { mintTo } from "thirdweb/extensions/erc721";
    import { createWallet, injectedProvider } from "thirdweb/wallets";
     
    const client = createThirdwebClient({ clientId });
     
    const wallet = createWallet("io.metamask"); // or any wallet id
    const account = await wallet.connect({ client });
     
    // 3 · Wrap the deployed contract
    const contract = getContract({
      client,
      chain: arbitrumSepolia,
      address: "<DEPLOYED_ADDRESS>",
    });
     
    // 4 · Prepare the mint transaction
    const transaction = mintTo({
      contract,
      to: "0xRecipient",
      nft: {
        name: "Stylus NFT #1",
        // image, description, attributes, … are optional
      },
    });
     
    // 5 · Send the transaction
    const result = await sendTransaction({ transaction, account });
    console.log("Minted token:", result);

Next Steps