Steven Goldfeder, co-founder of OffChain Labs, the company behind Arbitrum, said, "I've never shared this publicly before, but in the early days of building Arbitrum, we almost accepted funding from another major ecosystem to build Arbitrum on that ecosystem (not Ethereum)." He added, "We could have secured a significant amount of early funding, but it might have distracted us and impacted our plans to deploy on Ethereum. If we had accepted that funding, we would have had more money in the bank in 2019, but I don't think Offchain or Arbitrum would be where they are today." It's not surprising that other ecosystems offered larger funding packages, as they often provide less support than Ethereum, making deployment there more costly and requiring larger funding as compensation.