Arbitrum Airdrop Result
An in-depth analysis of Arbitrum's $ARB Airdrop
After years of development and 18 months on mainnet, Arbitrum Foundation has launched the DAO governance of Arbitrum and will distribute $ARB through one of the largest token airdrops in the industry's history. In this dashboard, We are going to take a closer look into the distribution of the tokens and the recipients' behavior on Arbitrum chain.
Moreover, We are going to investigate suspicious sybil attack activity to see if there is a case to be made that sybil attackers control a major stake of the airdrop
What is Arbitrum?
Arbitrum is the top layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum (in terms of TVL) that aims to improve the efficiency and speed of the network. It is developed by Offchain Labs, a blockchain technology company founded in 2018 by a team of experienced blockchain developers. Arbitrum uses a technology called optimistic rollups, which allows it to process transactions off-chain and then batch them together into a single transaction that is submitted to the Ethereum blockchain. This approach greatly reduces the gas fees and network congestion associated with processing transactions on the Ethereum mainnet. Arbitrum is designed to be fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which means that smart contracts and decentralized applications (dApps) built on Ethereum can be easily ported over to the Arbitrum network. This makes it a promising solution for scaling Ethereum and enabling faster and cheaper transactions without sacrificing security or decentralization.
Arbitrum has been extremely successful in garnering traction, with the total value locked (TVL) on the chain almost doubling since the lows resulting from the FTX collapse. A large part of this move was driven by the popular perpetuals decentralized exchange (DEX), GMX, which currently holds more than 35% of TVL on Arbitrum. But the other significant driver for Arbitrum’s rapid ascent was the speculation around an airdrop of its token.
$ARB Token
After much anticipation, Arbitrum finally announced its token, ARB, and its airdrop on March 16, 2023, with the token to go live the following week on March 23, 2023, when block 16890400 on Ethereum mainnet is mined.
Title | Description |
---|---|
Initial Supply Cap | 10 Billion |
Inflation | Max 2% Per Year |
Minting/Burning Mechanism | L2 Smart Contract |
Bridgeable To Ethereum L1 | Yes |
Tokens Launch On | Arbitrum One |
On-Chain Governance (Voting) Happens On | Arbitrum One |
Airdrop Snapshot | Block 58642080 on Arbitrum One = February 6th, 2023 |
Who Is Eligible for the Airdrop?
Arbitrum designed a set of criteria to determine users who would be eligible for the airdrop and the size of each user’s airdrop. The airdrop criteria includes:
- Bridging transactions into Arbitrum
- Number of months in which transactions were made on Arbitrum
- Number of transactions made or smart contracts interacted with
- Aggregate value of transactions
- Activity on Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova
Users can check the criteria they have fulfilled and their allocated airdrop on the official Arbitrum Foundation website.
Aside from the various DEXs on Arbitrum, users can also consider centralized exchanges (CEXs) if they wish to sell their ARB tokens. Currently, several CEXs such as Binance, ByBit, OKX, KuCoin, and several others have announced that they will be listing ARB on launch day.
Arb Token Distribution
On March, 23, 2023, 1.162 billion ARB tokens will be airdropped to individual wallets, representing 11.62% of the total token supply of the ARB token, which sits at 10 billion tokens.
There are total of 625,143 eligible addresses for the airdrop, falling into this range. On the high end of the spectrum, just over 4,400 addresses will be eligible to claim the maximum amount of 10,250 ARB tokens.
At the same time, 4.278 billion tokens will be released to the Arbitrum decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) treasury. The vesting period of these tokens will be determined by governance vote. The use of these tokens will be controlled by ARB token holders via governance proposals known as Arbitrum Improvement Proposals (AIPs). As such, Arbitrum’s token airdrop also represents the team’s first step towards decentralizing the chain to the community. But that’s not all. Looking closely at the distribution, 113 million ARB tokens will also be distributed to DAO treasuries of protocols building on Arbitrum.
Much like the airdrop to individuals, the airdrop to protocols will also be determined by a separate point-based system. The criteria includes:
- When the protocol deployed to Arbitrum
- Whether the protocol was Arbitrum-native, Ethereum and Arbitrum-native or multichain
- Number of daily and total transactions executed on the protocol
- Financial value of transactions that occurred on the protocol as a percentage of the activity registered by all similar protocols on Arbitrum
This distribution to protocols sought to create a more diverse base of ARB token holders to further decentralize the chain across the team, investors and individual users. Moreover, as protocols directly build on the chain, protocols could propose changes from the perspective of builders to the benefit of all users of Arbitrum.
While the exact distribution has not been released, Nansen, which collaborated with Arbitrum to determine the airdrop allocation, has released a chart showing the distribution of transactions and contract logs by entity since the inception of Arbitrum One.
The remaining 4.447 billion tokens will be subjected to a four-year lockup, with the first unlock occurring one year after the upcoming airdrop, on 23 March 2024. Subsequent unlocks will take place monthly, with the final unlock on 23 March 2027.
As the days count down to the airdrop, users have also begun speculating on the opening price of the ARB token.
One school of thought compares Arbitrum to its closest competitor and fellow optimistic rollup, Optimism. Optimism currently trades at a fully-diluted market cap of $10.81 billion, with TVL of just over $980 million. Using Arbitrum’s current TVL of $1.8 billion, some traders have estimated a fully-diluted valuation for Arbitrum at $19.86 billion. This would give the ARB token an opening price of $1.98.
Another line of thought uses the currently live ARBUSDT futures contract trading on BitMEX to estimate an opening price for the token launch. As of writing this article, the futures contract expiring on 30 June 2023 trades at $1.38 per token.