Offchain Labs is cutting it close with the launch of Arbitrum One, the Ethereum scaling solution.

The company has promised a launch date by the end of August, which is obviously rapidly approaching.

Yesterday there were 60 different pull requests still pending on Offchain Lab’s Github page, which open-source software developers use to collaborate.

Some were quick fixes but others seemed more involved.

An email by Stockhead to an email address listed on the company’s website as being devoted to media inquiries was returned as undeliverable earlier this month.

But in the Arbitrum’s Discord channel yesterday, a moderator was still reassuring people that an August launch was still on. But they wouldn’t give an exact date.

Any delay would be a blow to Ethereum, which has faced skyrocketing gas fees resulting from network congestion.

OpenSea, the NFT marketplace, has been the biggest “gas guzzler” in recent days.

Yesterday a simple token transfer was costing users US$16.15 in Ether, while an exchange of tokens on Uniswap was costing users $US49.69.

On next-generation crypto platforms such as Solana and Avalanche, similar transactions cost less than a dollar.

Meanwhile another Ethereum scaling solution, Optimism, opened to users in “alpha” in July, but still doesn’t have much to show for it. Just a dozen tokens were available for trading on Uniswap‘s deployment on Optimism when Stockhead checked yesterday.

Other popular Ethereum decentralised applications such as Aave have yet to deploy on Optimism at all, and Sushi says it might skip the platform altogether.

Offchain Labs is taking a different approach with Arbitrum, promising a “fair launch” that will be open for all. Crypto exchange Huobi Global says it will offer direct offramps and onramps onto Arbitrum, which should help it gain traction.