Empowering Sub-Communities

The $ARB governance token is the first native digital asset of Arbitrum. As part of the platform's airdrop, 11.62 percent of the circulating supply of the token is distributed to early supporters, and 1.13 percent is distributed to developers who build on Arbitrum. This means that 12.75 percent of the token's total supply will enter circulation soon.

According to Arbitrum foundation, the airdrop was not retroactive. It was instead a way to empower sub-communities on the layer2 network to decide how governance is handled locally.

As Arbitrum noted, airdrops would only be available to projects with a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) and community treasury. Nevertheless, it made an exception for The Protocol Guild, a collection of Ethereum core developers.

‍

How Much $ARB Did DAOs Receive?

When selecting projects for airdrops, Arbitrum evaluated factors including their deployment date and whether they were multi-chain or native to their ecosystem. Additionally, the transaction volume and the total value of assets locked onto the project, as well as native liquidity, are also considered.

Arbitrum airdropped a total of 112.834 million $ARB to DAOs. Following are the top seven DAOs that received the most $ARB during the airdrop, according to a list compiled by Nansen: 

• Treasure DAO: Treasure is an Arbitrum-based decentralized network for blockchain-based metaverse projects. Through its NFT marketplace and gaming and staking platform, Bridgeworld, Treasure aims to bootstrap new, decentralized metaverses and support their growth. The Arbitrum Foundation airdropped 8 million $ARB to Treasure, the most ever received by a DAO. 

• GMX: On the next line is GMX, which also received 8 million $ARB. With GMX, you can trade both spot and perpetual assets for low swap fees and with close to no price impact. Liquidity providers earn fees from market making, swap fees, and leverage trading via this multi-asset pool.

• Uniswap: Uniswap facilitates automated trading of decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens through its decentralized trading protocol. Token trading on Uniswap is fully automated and open to anyone who owns tokens, while trading is more efficient than on traditional exchanges. Uniswap obtained 4.378 million $ARB. 

• Sushiswap: SUSHI is an automated market maker (AMM). An increasingly popular tool among cryptocurrency users, AMMs are decentralized exchanges which use smart contracts to create markets for any given pair of tokens. The protocol aims to diversify the AMM market and also add new features not found on Uniswap, such as an in-house token, SUSHI, that rewards network participants. Sushi DAO received 4.249 million $ARB. 

• Dopex: The Dopex protocol maximizes liquidity for option writers while minimizing losses for option buyers. Users may deposit base/quote for their respective pools, earn passive income through writing and purchasing discounted options through liquidity pools. A total of 3.863 million $ARB was received by Dopex. 

• Curve: Curve manages liquidity using an automated market maker (AMM) on a decentralized exchange for stablecoins. In August, Curve launched a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), using CRV as its underlying token. The DAO connects multiple smart contracts for users' deposited liquidity using the Ethereum-based Aragon creation tool. Curve received 3.476 million $ARB.

• Radiant Protocol:  Radiant has been designed to solve scale, parallelism, and Turing Complete programming problems associated with all existing blockchains. It is a peer-to-peer digital asset system that facilitates direct trade between users without requiring a central authority. Radiant Capital received 3.348 million $ARB.

In addition to these protocols, Balancer, Protocol Guild, CAP, Vest Finance were also among the projects that received most airdrops. The launch of the Arbitrum token is among the most anticipated events in the crypto space this year, especially since it is gaining momentum in the DeFi sector without a governance token since last year. 

Arbitrum ($ARB) is trading at $1.32 with a $1.674 billion market cap. According to CoinMarketCap the price of the token fell by more than 88% today, within minutes after it was listed across various exchanges. 

‍

What is Arbitrum:

Arbitrum is an Ethereum layer-2 network that enables developers to build and deploy highly scalable smart contracts at low cost. You can use Arbitrum chains to do all the things you do on Ethereum — use Web3 apps, deploy smart contracts, etc., but your transactions will be cheaper and faster. The flagship product for the team, Arbitrum Rollup, is an Optimistic rollup protocol that inherits Ethereum-level security.

Website | Docs | Twitter | Blog |