The excitement during the airdrop Arbitrum collapsed the project website

Already requested 278 million ARB. The developers reminded that receiving tokens will be available within six months

The excitement during the distribution of Arbitrum tokens (ARB) collapsed the site of the Arbitrum Foundation project. It could not cope with the number of requests from users who wanted to receive tokens, the site began to load, but it works with delays. The developers reminded that receiving tokens will be available within six months.

Recipients of the long-awaited Arbitrum airdrop began applying on March 23 to receive tokens that give them the authority to participate in the management of DAOs that control the operation of the Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova networks.

As part of the airdrop, 1.16 billion ARBs are to be issued to network users, which is 11.6% of the total supply of 10 billion tokens. Another 113 million Arbitrum will be available to receive already existing DAOs in the ecosystem. According to analytics platform Dune, 278.7 million ARBs have already been requested.

Meanwhile, Arbitrum began trading on crypto exchanges. Binance, which previously announced the start of trading at 20:00 Moscow time, announced that it will open them two hours earlier.

According to CoinGecko, ARB is already trading on the KuCoin, Gate.io, BitFinex, OKX, Bitget, Bybit, Huobi, MEXC, Kraken, Bitrue exchanges, as well as Uniswap and Sushiswap on the Arbirtum One network.

On some exchanges, the price of the token reached $50 at the moment, but the average maximum rate since the beginning of trading was $8.67. By 17:50 Moscow time, it dropped to $1.24, showing a decrease of 75.5% from the starting price of $5. ARB trading volume exceeded $216 million in less than two hours.

What is the Arbitrum project. Why is this the most anticipated airdrop of the year?

The long-awaited launch of the native asset of the largest Ethereum scaling project is scheduled for March 23. We explain what you need to know about the distribution of tokens and what caused the high hype

Offchain Labs, the developer of the Arbitrum ecosystem, announced the launch of its own ARB token, part of the offer of which will go to active users of the platform through an airdrop — the distribution of tokens by developers. The excitement around the distribution and the start of trading in the token arose after an example of a successful experience with its own asset from the main competitor of the project, Optimism, and the demand for the token was formed even before its listing on exchanges.

The ARB token will be released on March 23, and users who have been actively using products in the Arbitrum ecosystem during the year will be able to apply for the distribution. The project itself is a so-called second-level blockchain for Ethereum, which makes it faster and cheaper to process transfers on the network. For understanding: if in Ethereum at the basic level there are about 14 transactions per second on average, then Arbitrum allows you to increase their number to 40 thousand with a multiple of a lower commission.

The founders of Offchain Labs are Princeton University professor Stephen Goldfeder and two of his graduate students. In 2021, the company raised $120 million from Lightspeed Ventures and several well-known crypto-currency venture funds at a $1.2 billion valuation. Ethereum scaling projects have formed an entire industry around themselves, Arbitrum’s main competitors in this market are Optimism and Polygon solutions. The company behind the latter, Polygon Labs, received venture capital funding for a total of $450 million, and the project token under the ticker MATIC is in the top 10 of the CoinMarketCap rating in terms of market capitalization.

More and more blockchain developers who have taken the plunge are running into the glaring scaling problems faced by decentralized apps on the Ethereum blockchain while the wider cryptocurrency community experiences a late-summer boom in enthusiasm. The network has seen its popularity skyrocket in the past year, but its transaction volume has been frustratingly steady as the network continues to function near its limits, leading to slower transaction speeds and expensive fees on the crowded chain.

To address these problems, Ethereum’s core developers have been preparing massive blockchain improvements; however, even in the early phases of the cryptocurrency industry, migrating the network is a difficult and time-consuming task. The so-called Layer 2 rollup scaling solutions, which are built on top of the Ethereum network and handle transactions separately in a quicker, cheaper manner while still recording the transactions to the Ethereum blockchain, albeit in batches, are being considered by developers as a solution to this problem.

Paradigm and Andreessen Horowitz funds invested in Optimism in March 2022, the project is estimated at $1.65 billion. In June of the same year, its developers issued the OP token, similarly organizing its distribution by airdrop and further entry to the leading crypto exchanges .

Throughout the most recent crypto bull run, many of new crypto users have engaged with the Ethereum network for the first time and have been surprised to find sluggish, pricey transactions. Although the concept of a web3 crypto internet has been heavily centered around the Ethereum blockchain, the blockchain has struggled to keep up with user demand.

This has pushed some founders to build competing blockchains on entirely unique infrastructure, while others in the developer community are focusing their resources on building modular blockchain solutions that sit on top of Ethereum, bundling transactions faster and cheaper while keeping a record of the movements on the central chain.

Who will receive tokens

The distribution of tokens helps to create a network effect and primary liquidity of tokens in the market. One of the recent examples of projects with a sensational airdrop was the Blur NFT marketplace, which quickly won market share and users from its largest competitor, OpenSea. A well-thought-out campaign with the distribution of tokens and the attraction of new traders played an important role in this.

Offchain Labs partnered with analytics firm Nansen to identify ARB recipients and filter out multiple fraud attempts and other scams by applicants. The amount of tokens received was influenced by the number of transactions in the ecosystem, the set of applications used on the Arbitrum blockchain, the duration of participation, and other factors. The transparency of the blockchain as a public registry of each user action allows you to fully verify the set of their activities.

The total turnover of ARB will be 10 billion pieces. The Arbitrum community will control 56% of the existing tokens: 11.5% of the supply is allocated for distribution via airdrop, another 1.1% will be received by existing DAOs in the Arbitrum ecosystem. The remaining community tokens will go to the treasury, controlled by the new DAO from the Arbitrum Foundation.

Another 44% of ARB will go to investors and employees of Offchain Labs. These tokens will be subject to lock-up periods and entitlement schedules, Goldfeder said. The share of ARB reserved for insiders is higher than for similar projects. In the case of Optimism, investors and developers got 36% of OP tokens.

“The technology was developed first. Based on our roadmap, now is the right time, ” Goldfeder explains , answering a question from Coindesk about the delayed launch of its own token. According to him, Arbitrum has reached certain technical milestones that its main competitor has not yet reached.